at she had seen dimly the
night before, she went curiously to the window.

There were two of them now. They were bodies, human bodies, naked and
unquestionably dead. In the night, the dry, vampirish Martian air had
dessicated them. They were skeletons, parchment skin stretched tightly
over the lifeless bones.

Even as she stood and looked, a group of figures appeared on the horizon
and came slowly nearer. They were Martians--monstrous creatures,
huge-chested, humpbacked, with tremendously long, thin legs and arms,
their big-eyed, big-eared heads mere excrescences in front of their
humps.

Trailing slowly through the desert toward Aurorae Sinus, they passed
near the skeleton bodies. One of the Martians saw them. He boomed
excitedly at the others, loudly enough for Maya to hear through the
double window.

The Martians stopped and gathered around the bodies.

What, she wondered, could interest them in two corpses? There was no
guessing. Martian motives and thought processes were alien and
incomprehensible, even to one who had lived among them and communicated
with them as a child.

One of the Martians picked up one of the corpses, and the whole group
moved away toward the lowland, the Martian carrying the body easily with
one long-fingered hand. Wisps of sandy dust trailed them as they
dwindled and slowly vanished.

The second body lay where they had left it. A gaping wound in its throat
seemed to mock her.

4

Fancher Laddigan made his way down a long dim corridor in the rear
portion of the Childress Barber College, in Mars City's eastern quarter.
He stopped and hesitated, with some trepidation, before an unmarked door
near the end of the corridor.

Completely bald, bespectacled and well up in years, Fancher looked like
a clerk and he had the instincts of a clerk. Yet he utilized that
appearance and those instincts in a perilous cause.

Fancher knocked timidly on the door. On receiving an indistinct
invitation from inside, he pushed it open and entered.

Fancher had a tendency to shiver every time he had occasion to see the
Chief, whose real name was unknown to Fancher and to most others here at
the barber college.

Small as a child in body, wagging a thin-haired head larger than
lifesize, the Chief surveyed Fancher with icy green eyes. The eyes were
large and round as a child's, but there was nothing childlike about
their expression. As though to deny his physical smallness, he smoked
one of th