The leader motioned. The others dismounted. Working with the swift precision of soldiers, they removed equipment from their saddle-packs and began to assemble it. The man crouching under the tor saw the thing that took shape. It was a Banning shocker, and he knew that he was not going to fight his way out of this trap. His pursuers were out of range of his own weapon. They would remain so. The Banning, with its powerful electric beam, would take him--dead or senseless, as they wished. He thrust the useless gun back into his belt. He knew who these men were, and what they wanted with him. They were officers of the Earth Police Control, bringing him a gift--twenty years in the Luna cell-blocks. Twenty years in the grey catacombs, buried in the silence and the eternal dark. He recognized the inevitable. He was used to inevitables--hunger, pain, loneliness, the emptiness of dreams. He had accepted a lot of them in his time. Yet he made no move to surrender. He looked out at the desert and the night sky, and his eyes blazed, the desperate, strangely beautiful eyes of a creature very close to the roots of life, something less and more than man. His hands found a shard of rock and broke it. The leader of the four men rode slowly toward the tor, his right arm raised. His voice carried clearly on the wind. "Eric John Stark!" he called, and the dark man tensed in the shadows. The rider stopped. He spoke again, but this time in a different tongue. It was no dialect of Earth, Mars or Venus, but a strange speech, as harsh and vital as the blazing Mercurian valleys that bred it. "_Oh N'Chaka, oh Man-without-a-tribe, I call you!_" There was a long silence. The rider and his mount were motionless under the low moons, waiting. Eric John Stark stepped slowly out from the pool of blackness under the tor. "Who calls me N'Chaka?" The rider relaxed somewhat. He answered in English, "You know perfectly well who I am, Eric. May we meet in peace?" Stark shrugged. "Of course." * * * * * He walked on to meet the rider, who had dismounted, leaving his beast behind. He was a slight, wiry man, this EPC officer, with the rawhide look of the frontiers still on him. His hair was grizzled and his sun-blackened skin was deeply lined, but there was nothing in the least aged about his hard good-humored face nor his remarkably keen dark eyes. "It's been a long time, Eric," he said. Stark nodded. "Sixteen years." The two men studied each other for a moment, and then Stark said, "I thought you were still on Mercury, Ashton." "They've called all us experienced hands in to Mars." He held out cigarettes. "Smoke?" Stark took one. They bent over Ashton's lighter, and then stood there smoking while the wind blew red dust over their feet and the three men of the patrol waited quietly beside the Banning. Ashton was taking no chances. The electro-beam could stun without injury.