cealed by its intervention. The groundcar was a mechanical bug,
an alienness with which timorous man had allied himself; allied with it
against reality, she and Nuwell were hastened by it through reality,
unseeing, toward the goal of a more comfortable unreality.

The groundcar bumped and slithered, and an orange dust-cloud boiled up
from its broad tires and wafted away across the sculpted sand. The
desert stretched away, silent and empty, to the distant horizon; the
groundcar the only humming disturbance of its silence and emptiness. The
steel-blue sky shimmered above, a lens capping the red surface.

The groundcar rolled westward, slashing toward its goal from the distant
lowland of Solis Lacus. Far away, two men, machineless, plodded this
same Xanthe Desert toward the same goal; but they plodded southward,
approaching on a different radius.

They were naked. In a thin atmosphere without sufficient oxygen to
support animal life or even the higher forms of terrestrial plant life,
they wore no marsuits, no helmets, no oxygen tanks.

The man who walked in front was tall, erect, powerfully muscled. His
features and short-clipped hair were coarse, but self-assured
intelligence shone in his smoky eyes. He moved across the loose sand,
barefoot, with easy grace.

The--man?--that shambled behind him was as tall, but appeared shorter
and even more muscular because his shoulders and head were hunched
forward. His even coarser face was characterized by vacuously slack
mouth and blue eyes empty of any expression except an occasional brief
frown of puzzlement.

Toward a focal point: from the east, two people; from the north, two
people. If in the efficient self-assurance of Adam Hennessey could be
paralleled a variant harmony with the insistent surfaceness of S. Nuwell
Eli, does any coincidental parallelism exist between Brute Hennessey and
Maya Cara Nome?

Puzzlement was the climate of Brute's mind. This surface film of things
through which he ploughed his way, the swarming currents below the
surface--all were chaos. He grasped vaguely at comprehension without
achieving, the effective coalescence of electric ideas always falling
short before reaching consciousness.

The two men plodded, naked, through the loose sand. Above them in the
Mars-blue dome of day, the weak sun turned downward, warning of its
eventual departure.

A two-passengered groundcar and two men, widely apart, and yet bound for
the same destination....