The sun dropped behind the far cliffs and the red twilight of Mars deepened suddenly into darkness. Shaan was safe from discovery for the night now, but the girls might not be rescued in time. He picked them up from the ground and started off in the general direction of the cactus that had been his temporary home before. He plodded through the canal sage, the girls a dead weight under his arms. Twice the government 'copters plaintively demanded directional help. After the second time, he switched off the helmet radio. He was doomed to death if he were discovered. Nowhere on Mars did he have a friend. Even the unconscious girls he carried would hate him now. And what was to become of them? MkDowl's Dome would not be rebuilt by another tenant. If he gave up his marsuit to one of them, that would be only one, and the marsuit radio would not reach Kling's Dome. At least one, probably both, were stranded with him. Not for them would he give up his own life to stay near MkDowl's Dome and call the 'copters in. * * * * * Shaan was a democrat and by virtue of that was engaged in a war without quarter against almost everyone else on Mars. He was a lone relic of a defeated army, and he had been driven to the wall. He could surrender to death, or he could fight for survival. Many men before him, and many living creatures before man appeared on Earth, had faced that situation in one form or another, he thought. Some had succumbed. Others had lived. The ancestors of man himself had faced it and lived, when they were driven by voracious creatures of the sea into the shallows and at last to the inhospitable land. Now he was driven to a shore more inhospitable than any on Earth, oxygen-poor, water-poor: the Martian shore. Many years ago his ancestors had learned to crawl instead of swim. He and his descendants--the descendants of Lori and Vali--could learn to crawl instead of walk. Those who crawled could survive and evolve, without domes, without marsuits, without any man-made equipment. He reached the base of a giant cactus. He was sure it was not the one he had inhabited before, but now he had a knife. In the distant night sky, he heard the drone of 'copter motors. Shaan laid the girls down at his feet and dropped prone at the foot of the cactus. When the leaves of the canal sage had closed slowly above them, he took off his marshelmet. "Man is man because he thinks, not because he walks erect," Shaan murmured to the unconscious girls. "Would your fate be better if you birthed children who had to live in a plastic dome?" Shaan was a democrat. Rightly or wrongly, he was convinced that the Imperial Government bore within it the seeds of dissatisfaction and strife, eventually a war of rebellion that would crumble the domes and leave all the people of Mars to gasp away their lives. Let them destroy themselves. Men would still live on Mars, without the domes. With the handle of his knife, he smashed the marshelmet.