with dew in
monstrous droplets. Boles, moving through the supple growths, marched
sturdily under a constant waterfall from the trees, his progress
disturbed.

Then Fahnes laughed softly to himself. He took his hand from below the
dry-blanket a man has to sleep under, on Oryx, if he isn't to wake in a
pool of water. He had a bolt-pistol in his fingers. All the time Boles
talked, there'd been that bolt-pistol ready to kill him. Perhaps--just
possibly--it had been a mistake to let him live. But he'd gone off
unarmed, anyhow. There was no need of weapons on Oryx. The Honkies
didn't kill things. Their religion forbade it. And besides men had
red blood like Honkies, and there was a religious prohibition against
Honkies ever looking at anything which was red.

Fahnes got up and made an adjustment on the space-radio. It had
been silent for four days--since he heard the first notice from the
supply-ship that it was ten days ahead of schedule and would arrive
before Boles expected it. He still didn't expect it, because Fahnes
hadn't told him. And he'd gone off, now, and the ship would have come
and gone and many things would have happened before his return. Now
Fahnes readjusted the set for reception and dressed leisurely, smiling
to himself.

Off through the jungle, the noise of the dew-god died away. Fahnes
glanced through the trading-post window. There was grayness to the
east where the local sun rose. No coloring at all. Just light. As he
watched, the white disk of the sun appeared. There was never any rain
on Oryx, and the reason for that anomaly also prevented colorings in
the sky at dawn and sunset.

Oryx was a magnesium planet. Magnesium was omnipresent on its surface,
as sodium is everywhere on Earth. The chloride was the common compound.
And just as on earth there is salt in some concentration everywhere, so
on Oryx there was magnesium chloride in the body-fluids of the Honkies
and the insects--there were no animals to speak of--and in the sap of
the trees, and impregnated in every particle of the soil. The results
were outstanding, because magnesium chloride is deliquescent to a high
degree.

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