Steel-hard, imperishable, the few fragments of the ancient oil of the Vadirrian tree which had been such a common article of commerce in the olden days commanded today a price so astronomical men were made wealthy for life through the discovery of a mere pinhead scrap or drifting grain. Radio-activated through the ages by the action of Mar's inner core, it had come to mean salvation in scores of the terrible new plagues introduced among the planets by the advent of space-travel. There were perhaps no more than six to eight ounces in the hospitals of the entire Universe at the present time, worth over three hundred and sixty billion credits. Here, in perfect condition, lay sixty tons. He had come into the desert seeking death and the release it brought; he had found fortune inestimable. The irony of his plight brought a wry, bitter smile to his cracked lips, for, after all, he could hardly be said to have been cheated of his earlier aim. Fortune or none, death sat grinning at him from the broken timbers of the ancient ship, gleaming from the petrified oil still in its original shape from jars now dust and less than dust. Without food or water, he stood already dead and nothing here in the shadows could save him from the inexorable end he had so persistently sought. Thorne stumbled from the freighter and stood once more in the hot, bright Martian sunlight. The giant tower of the deserted city loomed behind him, but he did not look that way. He stared a moment at the blade of his spear, faintly gleaming even in this bright glare, then all around him at the rolling desolation which had once been the proud, rich harbor of the great city now mouldering in silence along the powdered quays behind him. There was no life. Blindly he moved away, scuffing through the sand. The excitement of his find wore down and the griping pangs of torment again seized and wrenched at him. Yet it was not with the same aimless shamble with which he had entered the sunken harbor bowl that he left it, but, instinctively, he found himself trying to follow his own plainly marked trail across the shallow sand hills. He might make it. He did not, of course. Weakened and broken by his long, waterless march into the desert, sapped by his own excesses, he followed his trail for mile after mile until it blurred and spun before his eyes and melted at last into one blinding haze of flaming Martian heat. The trail vanished, though he did not know he had wandered from it. Presently he knew nothing but that, somehow, he must keep going on and on. Why, he could no longer remember, but the dim, instinctive urge was there and served to motivate him when he would have fallen to die with the others over whose mummies he more than once stumbled.