* * * * * A rolling something on the red sands caught his alert gaze. He smiled gently. A tumblie. Probably Xax, who liked him. He watched it roll straight and fast over the desert, toward him. Nature had made a perfect gyroscope in a tumblie: a round ball of sharp, glistening spikes with a core of jelly that stayed level no matter how fast the powerful spikes rotated. Two long feelers, like skeletal arms, lay hidden in the spikes, but could stretch beyond them to clutch food seeking to escape. In the heart of the jelly was a strong brain. Xax stopped, looking between his hard spikes at the blackened ruins. "You leave the desert, Kortha?" "I go to Yassa." He felt the alarm of the tumblie, and sighed as Xax shrilled, "You go to death! Only the tumblies have ever entered Yassa and--lived. There is a part of Yassa that even a tumblie cannot penetrate. The white tower. The temple of dead, forgotten Zut." Kortha hefted his big hammer and eyed its gleaming length. "Kortha has never gone to Yassa," he whispered grimly. It was not a boast; it was a statement of fact, a realization that there was only one Kortha. Xax looked around him and saw the tire marks in the sand. He sat silent, looking up at the man who towered more than six feet above him. "Someone was here," Xax said at last. "Ilse, wasn't it? You've told me enough of her! The Confederacy needs you, doesn't it? And you won't go." "I go to Yassa." "Mad. Mad!" "Not mad, Xax. So sane that I go to the one spot on Mars where I might bring her freedom, and a place in the planetary sun." Xax digested that, squatting there. At last he said, "You have not dwelt out here three years for nothing. You tried to hide from yourself at first, but you have learned things here on the desert." A pain tugged and tore at Kortha's heart, and his lips were bitter as they smiled. "You are clever, Xax. Smarter than Ilse." "Ilse is a woman who loves you. Her love is inclined to blind her." Kortha swung the hammer idly in his hand, eying the sunlight play across it. He took a stride toward Yassa, and another. "Come, Xax," he called. "It is easy to talk and walk at the same time." The tumblie rolled along beside him. They went out into the hot red sands, their shadows before them. Kortha fixed his eyes on the white blot that was Yassa, and his long legs lengthened their stride. Sand crunched faintly under his sandalled feet, releasing tiny clouds of red dust at every step. "Eons ago Mars was a cultured world, Xax. They had everything, our ancestors. Even you tumblies possessed your own civilization. The ancients had power, and weapons long since forgotten by the clans that descended from the survivors of the Great War.