But her heart was pounding extraordinarily loud. His eyes-- Don jumped from his camel. His hands were shaking as he raised his quirt. "Out of the way!" he shouted, then turned slightly. "Don't come any nearer, folks! It'll be all right. I'll have him out of the way in a minute." "We'll all be contaminated," whispered Mrs. Ericson. "Just stay clear. You have to contact them directly to be contaminated," Don said. He stopped five feet from the old man and raised his quirt. The old man looked only at Madeleine, then shook his head slowly up and down as though reaffirming some special secret. As though he shared some secret with her. "Five credits," the old man said, in a loud whisper. "And I'll read the sands for you. The Martian sands know all your secrets and the timelessness of your dreams. Let them speak to you, through me, for five credits." Don swung the quirt savagely. It was heavy, and it thudded and smacked across the old man's face and chest. He fell in the middle of the trail. The sun wheeled crazily. Madeleine could hear her mother screaming and her father yelling as she moved, as though in a trance, toward the old man. Her feet slipped, stumbled in the shale. The old man crawled a little, got up, fell again. She was screaming at Don to stop. The old man had fallen to one side and the trail was clear now. "Let him alone! Let him alone!" Madeleine screamed. "He's out of the way!" "Madeleine!" Mr. Ericson shouted. "Come back! Get away from that beggar, right now, or we return to Earth in the morning!" For the first time in her life, that she could remember, her father's threats meant nothing. But the old fear was there as she moved toward the Martian hermit, on a painful tightwire of impulse between threat and desire. She had learned that for any real feeling--fear, joy, pain or even the dimmest-remembered pleasure, you paid a dear price. But she moved on. The old man's face was bleeding. She saw the long welts of red on the flesh, and the blood-flecks and tortured little broken channels of blood crossing it. Sound roared around her as she eluded Don's hands and knelt down, took the old man's head in her arms. She tilted her canteen to his lips. There was a kind of strange triumph in the old man's eyes as he peered past her for only a moment and looked at Don. And from somewhere--Madeleine couldn't even tell whether it was real--came a thought. "_Madeleine--come back. Come back when you can. And you will find joy._" Later she knew how she kicked and screamed at them as they dragged her away. How Mrs. Ericson was embarrassed by the display, and how her father refused to touch her because of the fear of contamination. And her mother weeping, later, because of the disgrace and because of what the other guests would think.