TYDORE'S GIFT By ALFRED COPPEL So unpredictable, these dead-world Tower Dwellers! Take old Tydore who placed such an inestimably valuable gift in the greed-hands of one he hated. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories September 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The sun was a shrunken red disk against the starfields, a distant pale luminosity surrendering to the encroachment of the falling night. Hoarfrost crunched under Marley's feet as he walked by the still black waters of the canal, and then thin wind whispered over the sand and across the breasts of the ancient hills. Starlight gleamed in the dark water as the day faded. Earth hung low in the sky, like an emerald pendant over the bosom of a sleeping woman. Marley pulled his silks and furs closer about his shoulders. The air was sharp and cold. His breath froze wraithlike in the icy evening as he hurried down the path toward Tydore's tower. The green planet shone like a beacon in his eyes. Home. The thought brought impatience and a longing to walk again under a pale sky and a warm sun. He looked about him with faint distaste. This peace--this solitude of low red hills and blue-black nights--was alien to Marley. It was unreal. Mars was a dream. An ancient wasted slumbering dream. Marley's lips compressed as he thought of Tydore and their last meeting. It seemed that Tydore laughed at him. Tydore withheld too much, and there was so little time left. There was an acrid core of decadence in the old Martian, Marley thought. A consciousness of too many millenia of civilization and decay. Devious was the word, perhaps, though it seemed a pallid one for the reality of the Martian's intricate mind. It was always impossible to know what he was thinking--how much he knew. About Marley being a spy. About the war on Earth. In spite of himself, Marley smiled. It sounded so melodramatic that way, but it was the way it really was. The Martians held the perfect weapon. Marley needed that weapon, and his nation had put forth a gigantic effort to get him to Mars so that he might steal it. Tydore's tower loomed up before him in the fading light, a fey filligree of minarettes and graceful flying buttresses too delicate for a grosser world than Mars. The tower's reflection shimmered in the still dark waters of the canal like an alter ego extending deep into the liquid depths. Marley descended the steps of delicately wrought stone that led to the tower's underground entrance with care, for the drifted ferric sand made them treacherous. How like the Martians, he thought with some irritation, to make it necessary to travel down in order to enter a tower. Everything the long way, the hard and devious way.