blurred before Charlie's burning eyes. His feet churned the clinging
mud, and he felt as if he were running in a dream.

"I'm sorry you're in it, too," he panted.

"It does not matter. I act as I must."

The Earthman rubbed sweat from his eyes with the back of a muddy
hand.

"Everything is wrong," he mumbled. "I still can't remember cracking up
the ship. Why did I always want to be a rocket pilot? Well ... I made
my bed!"

The oncoming figures wavered and blurred in the heat. Kho emitted a
grating sound reminiscent of an Earthly chuckle.

"As do all you mortals--who finally have to lie in them," he rasped.
"I will tell you now, since I can carry this episode little farther.
You have never piloted a spaceship."

Charlie gaped at him incredulously.

"You ... you ... what about the wreck?"

"It was a truck that hit you, Charles Holmes. You have no more sense
than to be crossing the street with your nose in a magazine just
purchased on the corner."

With some dulled, creeping, semi-detached facet of his mind, Charlie
noted that the running figures still floated above the sand without
actually drawing near.

"Are you--Do you mean I'm ... d-d-d--?"

"Of course you are," grated Kho amiably. "And in view of certain
actions during your life, there will be quite a period of--shall we
say--probation. When I was assigned to you, your reading habits
suggested an amusing series of variations. You cannot know how dull it
is to keep frustrating the same old dreams!"

"Amusing?" repeated Charlie, beyond caring about the whimper in his
tone.

The mob was dissolving into thin smoke, and the horizon was shrinking.

Kbo himself was altering into something redder of skin but equipped
with a normal number of limbs, discounting the barbed tail. The
constant heat of the "desert" began, at last, to seem explicable.

"For me a great amusement," grinned Kho, displaying hideous tusks.
"Next time, I'll be a Venusian. You will lose again. Then we can visit
other planets, and stars ... oh, we shall see a lot of each other!"

He cheerfully polished one horn with a clawed finger.

"_You_ won't enjoy it!" he promised.

* * * * *

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Flamedown, by Horace Brown Fyfe

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