and if you want to. This golf ball seems safe enough."

"Except for the dream-beast," muttered Jarvis with a faint shudder. He
frowned suddenly. "Say, as long as we're going that way, suppose I have
a look for Tweel's home! He must live off there somewhere, and he's the
most important thing we've seen on Mars."

Harrison hesitated. "If I thought you could keep out of trouble," he
muttered. "All right," he decided. "Have a look. There's food and water
aboard the auxiliary; you can take a couple of days. But keep in touch
with me, you saps!"

Jarvis and Leroy went through the airlock out to the grey plain. The
thin air, still scarcely warmed by the rising sun, bit flesh and lung
like needles, and they gasped with a sense of suffocation. They dropped
to a sitting posture, waiting for their bodies, trained by months in
acclimatization chambers back on earth, to accommodate themselves to the
tenuous air. Leroy's face, as always, turned a smothered blue, and
Jarvis heard his own breath rasping and rattling in his throat. But in
five minutes, the discomfort passed; they rose and entered the little
auxiliary rocket that rested beside the black hull of the _Ares_.

The under-jets roared out their fiery atomic blast; dirt and bits of
shattered biopods spun away in a cloud as the rocket rose. Harrison
watched the projectile trail its flaming way into the south, then turned
back to his work.

It was four days before he saw the rocket again. Just at evening, as the
sun dropped behind the horizon with the suddenness of a candle falling
into the sea, the auxiliary flashed out of the southern heavens, easing
gently down on the flaming wings of the under-jets. Jarvis and Leroy
emerged, passed through the swiftly gathering dusk, and faced him in the
light of the _Ares_. He surveyed the two; Jarvis was tattered and
scratched, but apparently in better condition than Leroy, whose
dapperness was completely lost. The little biologist was pale as the
nearer moon that glowed outside; one arm was bandaged in thermo-skin and
his clothes hung in veritable rags. But it was his eyes that struck
Harrison most strangely; to one who lived these many weary days with the
diminutive Frenchman, there was something queer about them. They were
frightened, plainly enough, and that was odd, since Leroy was no coward
or he'd never have been one of the four chosen by the Academy for the
first Martian expedition. But the fear in his eyes was more
understanda