The outer doorway was shaped like a fleur-de-lis and it opened from the top down, sliding into a recess of ancient, oily machinery. It would be far too simple to make a door that looked and worked like a door. Everything Marley had seen during his months on Mars served only to increase his sense of alienage. He had seen only Tydore, of course, of the living Martians. There were only a handful left and they lived in their isolated towers along the still canals surrounded by their tissue-thin manuscripts and ancient, reedlike music spools that filled the air of their retreats with skeins of weird and enharmonic melody. The weapon was Tydore's. He had rebuilt it from plans drawn by some ensorcelled armorer dead over five thousand years. Rebuilt it in the paradoxical way that Martians seemed to do everything, for if there was one thing that no Martian needed it was a weapon. No strife had marred the planet's peace for millenia. But build it he had, and Marley's hands itched for the sleek deadliness of it--the smooth grained stock, the oddly wrought, ornate muzzle. There was a vicious, tangy violence frozen into every line of the weapon. And it was the only hand gun Marley had ever seen that chained the forces of the atom. With such weapons an army could be invincible. * * * * * Tydore stood to greet him. With the elaborate courtesy of his kind, he performed the ritual gestures of welcome, his slender, finely veined hands tracing the ancient symbols in the air. "The gods of sand and wind have brought you safely to my house, man of Earth. I give thanks and pray you find peace and wisdom within my walls." The old Martian's chanting voice was like the fluting grace of a Scarlatti choral. It was one with the miniscule paintings that covered the walls, the finely wrought carvings on the antique flagstones under his feet. Marley was not at home in the fluid Martian tongue, but the very sound of the words conjured for him the serried ranks of spectral generations that had reached their culmination in this one robed ancient. And yet, he thought with irritation, Tydore's words mean not at all what they said. Through the finely polished phrases of welcome ran a thread of hidden mockery--even hate--for Marley and everything he represented. Never once had Tydore, by word or deed, indicated that he felt anything but friendship for his visitor from the silvery ship out on the desert, and yet there was no mistaking the nuance of contempt. Tydore despised Marley as an outworld savage. One with the despoilers of the holy places of Mars.