of every loyal citizen to shoot him dead on sight.

Shaan checked his oxygen dial. There was only about an hour's supply left. He couldn't cut his use of it down.

Instinctively, his hand dropped to his belt, but the vial of suspensene he'd carried so long was not there. They wouldn't leave him that. Suspensene was a drug that would put a man in suspended animation for twenty-four hours. It was used in such emergencies when oxygen ran low, to preserve life until rescue came.

What good would it have done him, anyhow? There would be no rescue for him. The radio equipment had been removed from his marshelmet. Even if it hadn't, no one would help a branded man.

He saw the green expanse of the canal when he was still far away from it. It was a thin line that broadened as he approached, panting, getting the best he could from his weary legs with long, floating leaps.

He reached the edge of the cliff. The canal was a hundred feet below him, too far to jump, even on Mars. He walked a mile southward along the rim, seeking a downward ledge.

There was no ledge. But Shaan found a roughness of projecting rocks, where the cliff was not entirely perpendicular. He scrambled down.

He jumped down the last twenty feet. He landed with a muffled crunch of broken branches in the canal sage that stretched in unbroken gray-green expanse from the base of the cliff, as far as the eye could see.

He got to his feet. The canal sage was uniformly knee-high. It was so close-packed that the tops formed an apparently solid carpet on the canal bottom.

He checked his oxygen dial. Only fifteen minutes' supply left. Even if he were on course, the private dome was at least twenty miles away.

He was in the shadow of the cliff here. The small sun of Mars was low in the west. Above him, the brightest stars already shone in the dark blue sky.

The cold of night was beginning to descend. There was frost on the leaves of the canal sage. He switched his marsuit temperature control from "cool" to "heat," but left it low. His body temperature would keep him warm enough as long as he was moving.

Fifteen minutes and then death. Shaan shrugged. He started walking, straight away from the cliff toward the distant sunlight that still touched 

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