ting, working
at small jobs. Others have gone to the Belt--which seems terrible for
someone not quite well. I hope that Jimmy bears up all right--he's such
a kid... Let's get out of here..."

Her expression was gently maternal. Or maybe it was something more?

Back in the lounge, she asked, "What will you do here, Frank?"

"Whatever it is, there is one thing I want to include," he answered. "I
want to try to find out just what happened to Mitch Storey."

"Natch. I remember him. So I looked the incident up. He disappeared,
deep in Syrtis Major, over three years ago. He had carried a sick
settler in--on foot. He always seemed lucky or careful, or smart. After
he got lost, his wife--a nurse from here whose name had been Selma
Washington--went looking for him. She never was found either."

"Oh?" Nelsen said in mild startlement.

"Yes... Talk to Ed Huth. There still are helicopter patrols--watching
for signs of a long list of missing people, and keeping tabs on late
comers who might turn out to be screwballs. You look as though you might
be Ed's type for that kind of work... I'll have to go, now, Frank. Duty
in half an hour..."

Huth was grinning at him a little later. "This department doesn't like
men who have a vanished friend, Nelsen," he said. "It makes their
approach too heroically personal. On the other hand, some of our lads
seem underzealous, nowadays... If you can live up to your successful
record in the Belt, maybe you're the right balance. Let's try you."

For a week, about all Nelsen did was ride along with Huth in the heli.
At intervals, he'd call, "Mitch... Mitch Storey...!" into his
helmet-phone. But, of course, that was no use.

He couldn't say that he didn't see Mars--from a safe altitude of two
thousand feet: The vast, empty deserts where, fairly safe from the
present dominant form of Martian life, a few adventurers and
archeologists still rummaged among the rust heaps of climate control and
other machines, and among the blasted debris of glazed ceramic
cities--still faintly tainted with radioactivity--where the original
inhabitants had died. The straight ribbons of thicket growths, crossing
even the deserts, carrying in their joined, hollow roots the irrigation
water of the otherwise mythical "canals." The huge south polar cap of
hoarfrost melting, blackening the soil with brief moisture, while the
frost line retreated toward the highlands. Syrtis, itself, where the
trails, once burned out with o