* * * * *

The sergeant's voice cut through the pre-dawn darkness. "Oh, three
hundred, Colonel.... Briefing in thirty minutes."

Kimball tried to see him in the black gloom. He hadn't been asleep. It
would have been hard to waste this last night that way. Instead he had
been remembering. "All right, Sergeant," he said. "Coming up."

He swung his feet to the bare boards and sat for a moment, wishing he
hadn't had to give up smoking. He could almost imagine the textured
taste of the cigaret on his tongue.

Oddly enough, he wasn't tired. He wasn't excited, either. And that was
much stranger. He stood up and opened the window to look out into the
desert night. Overhead the stars were brilliant and cold. Mars gleamed
russet-colored against the sable sky. He smiled, remembering again. So
long a road, he thought, from then to now.

Then he stopped smiling and turned away from the window. It hadn't been
an easy path and what was coming up now was the hardest part. The goddam
psychs were the toughest, always wanting him to bug out on the deal
because of their brainwave graphs and word association tests and their
Rorschach blots.

"You're a lonely man, Colonel Kimball----"

"Too much imagination could be bad for this job."

How could you sit there with pentothal in your veins and wires running
out of your head and tell them about the still waters of Korus, or the
pennons flying from the twin towers of Greater Helium or the way the
tiny, slanting sun gleamed at dawn through the rigging of a flyer?

Kimball snapped on a light and looked at his watch. 0310. Zero minus one
fifty. He opened the steel locker and began to dress.

* * * * *

_The water swirled warm and velvety around his ankles. There, behind
that madrone, Kimmy thought. Was that a Plant Man? The thick white trunk
and the grasping, blood-sucking arms----

The radium pistol's weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it
tightly, knowing that he could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword
alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way
John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to
attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.

For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening
stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from
the phonograph was very, very faint. Above him, the great vault of the
sky was changing from pink t