ied antiseptics
and bandages to the stumps of the two fingers. Alternately she scolded
and then soothed him.

"You do that real well," he said, approvingly. "You should have been a
mama, instead of an archeologist, and raised a whole slather of kids, so
you could bandage all their cuts and pat away all their bruises."

A longing as deep as the seas of Earth showed in her blue eyes.
"That--that was what I wanted. But I got side-tracked into a
profession." The longing was washed away in a film of sudden tears.

* * * * *

McLean closed his lips even tighter. He applied one eye to the sight of
the Rangeley, now adjusted to function as a periscope. Level and
apparently free of all danger, the grim red sands swept away to the low
mountains in the distance. The air was so clear and so thin that he
could even see the ruins of the city that had been their destination
when they had left the ship. The city was a vast mass of tumbled masonry
sprawled on treeless, forgotten hills. On the sand nothing moved. Yet
death was there in front of him, and his eye had certainly passed over
it.

"The nice little foxes are all in their nice little holes," he said.

The girl made a wan effort to smile. "How are your fingers? I mean, do
they hurt much?"

"They feel like I don't have them." Grinning at his own joke, McLean
swung the sight of the Rangeley around to their desert buggy. The
over-size tires loomed up like huge rubber doughnuts sprouting
mysteriously out of the desert sand. The door of the car was invitingly
open.

"It's only a quarter of a mile," he said. "We could sprint that far. But
how could we run at all without legs?"

"We have legs," the girl said eagerly. "Let's try to make the car."

"We wouldn't have 'em, if we jumped out of this hole and started
running. The little foxes have sharp teeth."

"Oh." Her voice dropped as the color faded from her eyes. "Then what are
we going to do?"

"Stay here and hope they send out another desert car from the ship
looking for us. If we don't return in a reasonable time, they may become
curious about us."

"And if they don't come?"

"We'll try to out-fox the foxes."

"If we had a radio--"

"We do, but it's in our buggy. If we were there, we wouldn't need a
radio. The dur-steel body of the car would stop the beam from that
needle gun. How the hell does it happen that wild tribesmen, with no
science and no industry, living here in a desert,