"Natch. I remember him. So I looked the incident up. He disappeared, deep in Syrtis Major, over three years ago. He had carried a sick settler in--on foot. He always seemed lucky or careful, or smart. After he got lost, his wife--a nurse from here whose name had been Selma Washington--went looking for him. She never was found either." "Oh?" Nelsen said in mild startlement. "Yes... Talk to Ed Huth. There still are helicopter patrols--watching for signs of a long list of missing people, and keeping tabs on late comers who might turn out to be screwballs. You look as though you might be Ed's type for that kind of work... I'll have to go, now, Frank. Duty in half an hour..." Huth was grinning at him a little later. "This department doesn't like men who have a vanished friend, Nelsen," he said. "It makes their approach too heroically personal. On the other hand, some of our lads seem underzealous, nowadays... If you can live up to your successful record in the Belt, maybe you're the right balance. Let's try you." For a week, about all Nelsen did was ride along with Huth in the heli. At intervals, he'd call, "Mitch... Mitch Storey...!" into his helmet-phone. But, of course, that was no use. He couldn't say that he didn't see Mars--from a safe altitude of two thousand feet: The vast, empty deserts where, fairly safe from the present dominant form of Martian life, a few adventurers and archeologists still rummaged among the rust heaps of climate control and other machines, and among the blasted debris of glazed ceramic cities--still faintly tainted with radioactivity--where the original inhabitants had died. The straight ribbons of thicket growths, crossing even the deserts, carrying in their joined, hollow roots the irrigation water of the otherwise mythical "canals." The huge south polar cap of hoarfrost melting, blackening the soil with brief moisture, while the frost line retreated toward the highlands. Syrtis, itself, where the trails, once burned out with oxygen and gasoline-jelly to permit the passage of vehicles, had again become completely overgrown--who could hope to stamp out that devilishly hardy vegetation, propagating by means of millions of windblown spores, with mere fire? The broken-down trains of tractors and trailers, now almost hidden. The stellene garden domes that had flattened. Here were the relics left by people who had sought to spread out to safety, to find old goals of freedom from fear. Several times in Syrtis, Huth and Nelsen descended, using a barren hillock or an isolated spot of desert as a landing area. That was when Nelsen first heard the buzzing of the growths. Twice, working warily with machetes, and holding their flame weapons ready, they chopped armored mummies from enwrapping tendrils, while little eye cells glinted at them balefully, and other tendrils bent slowly toward them. They searched out the space-fitness cards, which bore old dates, and addresses of next of kin.