no more gambling for me, no more living on the edge of the law. I bought into several respectable business ventures, content to add to my wealth slowly.

Dori and I built a home in Syrtis Major near Mars City and lived a quiet life together. Mars at that time was a man's world; it lacked divorce laws and similar legal and social machinery for terminating unsuccessful marriages. I doubt that Dori, being what she was, would have taken advantage of such avenues, anyhow. She was a good wife to me; she lacked only that former breathless adoration which had meant so little to me.

A few years after we arrived on Mars, we were invited to a week-long house party at the home of a business acquaintance, Leswill Odaan. Odaan's wealth was comparable to my own, and he lived here, in the lowland of Lacus Lucrinus.

These house parties are not as common now as they were in the old days. At that time, they were the major social activity of the rural dwellers of Mars. One invited one's friends for a week at his private dome in the lowlands—maybe twenty or forty at once. Then for a year or two he could expect to be a guest at similar parties every month or so, scattered all over the inhabited area of Mars. That's why the old homes of the wealthy out in the lowlands are so big.

Odaan didn't live in West o' Mars; I built it later. He had a square, sprawling chunk of buildings under a dome out in the center of the Lacus Lucrinus lowland. It was a crude display of raw wealth in execrable taste, with 14th century tapestries and neo-modern furniture mixed up in rooms which might be of Egypto-Cretan architecture. I saw nothing he owned to excite my envy—until, on a sage-jumping jaunt across the lowland the second day of our visit, I climbed the western cliff and saw the desert.

Bleak, lonely beauty has a strong appeal for me, Mr. Peache. Perhaps it is because it strikes a chord in the bleakness and loneliness of my own heart. But I never had seen anything before, and I never have seen anything since, to match the stark beauty of those buttes in the Aeolia Desert, as seen from the western cliffs of Lacus Lucrinus.

It was then that the conception of West o' Mars, as it could be and should be, sprang full-blown to my mind. I tell you, Mr. Peache, I saw this place then in my imagination, just as it is today, with this tower and this great window that overlooks the desert.

I had to have Lacus Lucrinus. And Leswill Odaan owned it.

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