the tangled stems.

At least he was alive. That was more than he had expected. He went to sleep.

When he awoke, he was lying on his back and the canal sage foliage was a sheet of golden green above his face. It was daytime. No shaft of sunlight broke through the leaves, but they were a pulsing foam of translucence.

The sun itself was a brighter spot in the roof of light.

The stems of the canal sage plants were not nearly as close together as they had seemed in the darkness. Most of them were at least a foot and a half apart. There were no leaves on the plants below their bushy, flattened tops, and the ground below them was a springy mattress of decaying leaves and twigs. He could move through it, though it would be hard on his hands and knees.

The sun would show him his directions, if he knew what time it was. He had no watch—they didn't waste expensive items like that on men condemned to die in the desert. He thrust his head momentarily above the foliage and located the cliffs in the west. It was morning, apparently about 0800.

He had some difficulty rigging a harness, but at last he managed to attach the marshelmet to his belt. He might need it again.

He ate again and began crawling eastward. The plant stems were not hard to thrust aside with his shoulders when they could be seen.

But crawling was a lot harder than walking. After a while he realized that his marsuit heating unit was still on. He turned it off. He wouldn't need it again until—or unless—he reached a dome.

Twenty miles is a long way to crawl, even on Mars. At the end of two days, he had not found the dome he sought, and his palms and knees were raw.

He had learned to push his head into the foliage so he could still breathe a little, for a short time, and thrust his eyes above the canal sage to survey the terrain around him. He did this periodically, but there was no dome to be seen.

As the shadow of the distant cliff, now dim in the blue haze, crept across the canal sage toward him on the second day of his odyssey, he saw the rounded top of a canal cactus reared above the sage. It was about two miles away. He ducked beneath the leaves and crawled.

When darkness caught him, he forced himself to interrupt his quest. Trying to crawl at night, 

 Prev. P 5/15 next