"I am your friend always, friend Thorne." The Martian's voice was gentle. "But you have come to the end. You know that now. But not in the sea." "Where else?" Thorne sat down abruptly, his legs giving way beneath him. A haze was descending over his foggy mind and he pressed his temples again, burying his face in his hands, Hanu nodded to the left. "The desert." Thorne looked up, amazed. "That horror!" "The desert is slow ... but not unkind. There will be many things to think on as you walk." Hanu leaned on his spear, regarding the sunken wreck sitting before him. "Our old men go forth in the evening when they no longer care to live. Our wicked pass from us across the sand, for we do not kill. There is peace there ... and rest. What else, we do not know. They never return." A shudder passed over the beachcomber. Slowly he rose to his feet. "No," he admitted, staring with a grudging, affectionate admiration at the grey one. "You do not kill." Abruptly he offered his hand. "Before I go?" Hanu smiled, pulling his whisker. "You will go? The woman is already gone and we will forget her like yesterday's tide, but we shall not forget the man who was with us that far-off day. We shall not forget." The pink-palmed, five-fingered hand clasped Thorne's. "Forget us not, friend Thorne." "I won't, Hanu. Goodby ... and thanks. It's all I can leave you, friend, but I know it counts, even from a space-rat like myself." Abruptly he wheeled and trudged away up the slope toward the higher trees back of the beach. He did not look back, even when Hanu's spear plunged into the sand twenty feet ahead and the grieving Martian wailed a piercing call of farewell. Taking the gift, Thorne staggered wearily on. Trees rose and fell about him, rude, stubby giants with the fat, pulpy stems designed to catch and store the precious polar waters melting before the first summer sun. The ridge passed and the rolling, bushy foothills along the coast led him endlessly down through the salt marshes where strange shapes moved and stirred at sight of the alien intruder. Then the arid hills beyond and, at last, cresting a bush-straggled rise, Thorne saw before him the first dun sweep of the vast inland deserts that have laid Mars waste and brought low a proud civilization. He slept there that first night, hollowing a little scoop of reddish sand for his ragged hip and a mound for his neck. For a time, after the first quick darkness, he lay watching Mars' rolling moons wheel across the horizon, silvering all the desolation and shimmering into a clear, alien beauty the ruin time had brought. Hanu, the chief, had been right. There were thoughts. But gradually the bitterness and ache of defeat sank away on a flood-tide of weariness and Thorne slept beneath the Martian moons. * * * * *