"They feel like I don't have them." Grinning at his own joke, McLean swung the sight of the Rangeley around to their desert buggy. The over-size tires loomed up like huge rubber doughnuts sprouting mysteriously out of the desert sand. The door of the car was invitingly open. "It's only a quarter of a mile," he said. "We could sprint that far. But how could we run at all without legs?" "We have legs," the girl said eagerly. "Let's try to make the car." "We wouldn't have 'em, if we jumped out of this hole and started running. The little foxes have sharp teeth." "Oh." Her voice dropped as the color faded from her eyes. "Then what are we going to do?" "Stay here and hope they send out another desert car from the ship looking for us. If we don't return in a reasonable time, they may become curious about us." "And if they don't come?" "We'll try to out-fox the foxes." "If we had a radio--" "We do, but it's in our buggy. If we were there, we wouldn't need a radio. The dur-steel body of the car would stop the beam from that needle gun. How the hell does it happen that wild tribesmen, with no science and no industry, living here in a desert, have a weapon like that needle ray gun?" "When they built their city there, they weren't desert tribesmen," the girl explained. "They were going somewhere, then, and they had science and at least light industry, and skilled workers. When they came back to the desert, they left everything behind them except their weapons. A primitive will always choose a weapon over anything else. He will value it as he values his life, because that is what it is." "Why did they come back to a desert?" "That's one thing we expected to discover in their ruined city, Pike." The girl's voice took on the patient tone of the expert instructing the amateur. "War with a neighboring tribe, in which they were defeated, might have been the reason. Change in climate might have been a factor. Perhaps there were other reasons too, famine, pestilence. They started up, then went back. This has happened so often that it seems to me that the seeds of decay always sprout at the same time as the seeds of greatness." "I wish I were an archeologist and a philosopher, and understood all those things," McLean said, longingly. "You are a man, which is more important." "Do you mean _male_?" "No. Man. _M-a-n_." She spelled the word for him. "Man. The highest level reached by the life force on Earth, to date. Or in the Solar System, as we know it." "Oh, you mean the top of the heap," McLean said. "Sure, we know that. But the little foxes hiding in their nice little holes don't know it. They don't think that being a man is so much." A thin sparkle of light flickered through the air above his head as he spoke. He had the impression that a crackling sound went with the death beam, like the rustle of static in space. "See! That's what they think of us! Targets!" * * * * *