e spat with fury, then kneeled and stuffed his mouth with sand, almost
gagging. After a while he spat out the sand too and opened his canteen
and rinsed his mouth. His lips and mouth were paralyzed by contact with
the poison. He walked quickly across the well-square to his aunt's
house. Inside, it was dim but hardly cooler. Steve was sweating, the
saline sweat making him blink. He scowled, not understanding. The table
was set in his aunt's house. A coffeepot was on the stove and last
night's partially-consumed dinner still on the table.

The well had been poisoned, the town had been deserted on the spur of
the moment, and Steve had returned to his boyhood home from Earth--too
late for anything.

He went outside into the square. A lizard was sunning itself and staring
at him with lidless eyes. When he moved across the square, the lizard
scurried away.

"Earthman!" a quavering voice called.

Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center,
a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and
sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin,
which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black.

Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost
spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the
canteen and said:

"What happened here?"

"They're gone. All gone."

"Yes, but what happened?"

"The Kumaji--"

"You're Kumaji."

"This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now
they're gone."

"But you stayed here--"

"To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too
old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water."

* * * * *

Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened."
Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century
Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were
sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The
Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life
on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one
oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy,
Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about
the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government,
so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had
suggest