d myself in
school principally by being the youngest, smallest (and consequently
the fastest-running) child in my classes ... Newspaper work has been
my career since 1936. I have worked for three newspapers, including
_The Nashville Tennessean_ for which I am now rewrite man, and
before the war for the Associated Press."

Mr. Fontenay is married, lives in Madison, Tenn., and has had one
other novel published by Ace Books.

* * * * *

1

It is a sea, though they call it sand.

They call it sand because it is still and red and dense with grains.
They call it sand because the thin wind whips it, and whirls its dusty
skim away to the tight horizons of Mars.

But only a sea could so brood with the memory of aeons. Only a sea,
lying so silent beneath the high skies, could hint the mystery of life
still behind its barren veil.

To practical, rational man, it is the Xanthe Desert. Whatever else he
might unwittingly be, S. Nuwell Eli considered himself a practical,
rational man, and it was across the bumpy sands of the Xanthe Desert
that he guided his groundcar westward with that somewhat cautious
proficiency that mistrusts its own mastery of the machine. Maya Cara
Nome, his colleague in this mission to which he had addressed himself,
was a silent companion.

Nuwell's liquid brown eyes, insistent upon their visual clarity, saw the
red sand as the blowing surface of unliving solidity. Only clarity was
admitted to Nuwell, and the only living clarity was man and beast and
vegetation, spotted in the dome cities and dome farms of the lowlands.
He and Maya scurried, transiting sparks of the only life, insecure and
hastening in the absence of the net of roads which eventually would bind
the Martian surface to human reality from the toeholds of the dome
cities.

In that opposite world which was the other side of the groundcar's seat,
Maya Cara Nome's opaque black eyes struggled against the surface. They
struggled not from any rational motivation but from long stubbornness,
from habit, as a fly kicks six-legged and constant against the surface
tension of a trapping pool.

Formally, Maya was allied to Newell's clarity and solidity, and she
could express this alliance with complete logic if called on. But behind
the casually blowing sand she sensed a depth. The shimmering atmosphere,
hostile to man, which sealed the red desert was a lens that distorted
and con