harlie, sitting up abruptly.

He held his breath, awaiting the knifing pain it seemed natural to
expect. When he felt none, he cautiously fingered his ribs, and then a
horrid thought prompted him to wiggle his bare toes. Everything seemed
to be in place.

He lay in a small room, on a thin pallet of furs. Floor and walls of
slick, ocher clay reflected the bright outside light pouring through a
wide doorway.

"What's all the sand?" he demanded, squinting at the heatwaves
outside.

"You do not recognize it? Look again, Earthman!"

_Earthman!_ thought Charlie. _It must be real: I can still see him.
What a whack on the head I must have got!_

"You are in pain?" asked the creature solicitously.

"Oh ... no. Just ... I can't remember. The crash ... and then--"

"Ah, yes. You have not been conscious for some time." His reddish host
rippled upward to stand more or less erect upon three thick tentacles.
"Even with us, memory is slow after shock. And you may be uneasy in
the lighter gravity."

_Light gravity!_ reflected Charlie. _This can only mean--MARS! Sure!
That must be it--I was piloting a rocket and cracked up somewhere on
Mars._

It felt right to him. He decided that the rest of his memory would
return.

"Are you able to rise?" asked the other, extending a helpful
tentacle.

The Earthman managed to haul himself stiffly to his feet.

"Say, my name is Holmes," he introduced himself dizzily.

"I am Kho Theki. In your language, learned years since from other
spacemen, I might say 'Fiery Canalman.'"

"_Has_ to be Mars," muttered Charlie under his breath. "What a bump!
When can you show me what's left of the ship?"

"There will be no time," answered the Martian.

Bunches of small muscles twitched here and there across the front of
his round, pudgy head. Charlie was getting used to the single eye,
half the size of an orange and not much duller. With imagination, the
various lumps and organs surrounding it might be considered a face.

"The priestesses will lead the crowd here," predicted Kho. "They know
I took an Earthman, and I fear they have finished with the others."

"Finished with--_What_?" demanded the Earthman, shaking his head in
hopes of clearing it enough to figure out what was wrong.

"It has been an extremely dry season." Kho rippled his tentacles and
moved lissomely to the doorway, assuming a grotesquely furtive posture
as he peered out. "The people are maddened by the drought. The will be
ar