t his
radio equipment in working order we'll call for help. If not, the only
thing I know to do is to head for Ophir."

Ultra Vires--Maya remembered it with a shudder. The grim, black bastion
in the desert where Goat Hennessey had worked with grotesque, twisted
caricatures of humans.

They fumbled about the wreck to find the minimum emergency supplies they
thought they would need, and started westward on foot.

10

Happy Thurbelow finished sweeping the long barracks and leaned wearily
on his broom. That is, he didn't lean on it, or it would have collapsed
him to the floor, but he made the gesture. Why, he wondered, didn't the
Masters make the Toughs sweep their own barracks? Perhaps the Toughs
couldn't be made, or perhaps the Masters did it just from an excess of
cruelty.

Happy's monstrously bloated body sagged, and his skin felt dangerously
dry and tight. Happy was so adipose that his hands engulfed the broom
handle like a toothpick; under the transparent skin, his flesh was clear
and translucent, and there could be seen the tiny red lines of the
branching veins. Happy was like a jellyfish, in huge human form.

"Shadow!" he called in a high, grating voice. "I'm going below."

Shadow appeared disconcertingly, ten feet away. Dark-skinned Shadow
looked at him silently with white-rimmed eyes. Then Shadow turned and
disappeared, as only Shadow could.

Hanging up the broom, Happy waddled to the iron-barred gate that
prevented entrance to a downward-plunging ramp. He pressed a button
beside it and waited.

He looked out the window beside the gate. The sands of the Desert of
Candor stretched orange and bleak under the bronze sky. Somewhere out
there to the south, across those sands, under that sky, lay the shining
dome of Ophir.

The window would be easily broken, and it was large enough for even
Happy's bulky body to pass through. But the oxygen-scant air of Mars
would sear his lungs to quick death without a helmet; and even if it
would not, Happy's skin would dry and crack in a few hours of that
outside air, and he would die in slower agony.

"What is the purpose of your call?" asked an impersonal voice from the
loudspeaker beside the barred gate.

"I have finished my task, Master," said Happy, puffing a little. "I seek
your grace to go below."

The loudspeaker said no more, but after a moment the gate stirred and
lifted into the ceiling. Happy went through it gratefully, and waddled
down the gentl