It Takes a Thief By Walter Miller, Jr. _Strange gods were worshipped on Mars. But were they so clever? They'd lost their own world._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] _"The ancient gods, our Fathers, rode down from the heavens in the Firebirds of the Sun. Coming into the world, they found no air for the breath of their souls. "How shall we breathe?" they asked of the Sun. And Sun gave them of His fire and beneath the earth they kindled the Blaze of the Great Wind. Good air roared from the womb of Mars our Mother, the ice burned with a great thunder, and there was air for the breath of Man._" --FROM AN OLD MARTIAN LEGEND * * * * * A thief, he was about to die like a thief. He hung from the post by his wrists. The wan sunlight glistened faintly on his naked back as he waited, eyes tightly closed, lips moving slowly as he pressed his face against the rough wood and stood on tiptoe to relieve the growing ache in his shoulders. When his ankles ached, he hung by the nails that pierced his forearms just above the wrists. He was young, perhaps in his tenth Marsyear, and his crisp black hair was close-cropped in the fashion of the bachelor who had not yet sired a pup, or not yet admitted that he had. Lithe and sleek, with the quick knotty muscles and slender rawhide limbs of a wild thing, half-fed and hungry with a quick furious hunger that crouched in ambush. His face, though twisted with pain and fright, remained that of a cocky pup. When he opened his eyes he could see the low hills of Mars, sun-washed and gray-green with trees, trees brought down from the heavens by the Ancient Fathers. But he could also see the executioner in the foreground, sitting spraddle-legged and calm while he chewed a blade of grass and waited. A squat man with a thick face, he occasionally peered at the thief with empty blue eyes--while he casually played mumblety-peg with the bleeding-blade. His stare was blank. [Illustration: "_Are you ready for me, Asir?_"] "Ready for me yet, Asir?" he grumbled, not unpleasantly. The knifeman sat beyond spitting range, but Asir spat, and tried to wipe his chin on the post. "Your dirty mother!" he mumbled. The executioner chuckled and played mumblety-peg. After three hours of dangling from the spikes that pierced his arms, Asir was weakening, and the blood throbbed hard in his temples, with each jolt of his heart a separate pulse of pain. The red stickiness had stopped oozing down his arms; they knew how to drive the spike just right. But the heartbeats labored in his head like a hammer beating at red-hot iron. _How many heartbeats in a life-time--and how many left to him now?_