enough to figure out what was wrong.

"It has been an extremely dry season." Kho rippled his tentacles and moved lissomely to the doorway, assuming a grotesquely furtive posture as he peered out. "The people are maddened by the drought. The will be aroused to sacrifice you to the Canal Gods, like the others who survived."

"Canal gods!" croaked Charlie. "This can't be right! Aren't you civilized here? I can't be the only Earthman they've seen!"

"It is true that Earthmen are perfectly safe at most times."

"But the laws! The earth consul—"

Kho snapped the tip of a tentacle at him.

"The canals are low. You can feel the heat and dryness for yourself. The crowds are inflamed by temple prophecies. And then, your ship, flaming down from the skies—"

He snapped all this tentacle tips at once.

From somewhere outside, a threatening murmur became audible. It was an unholy blend of rasping shouts and shriller chanting, punctuated by notes of a brassy gong. As Charlie listened, the volume rose noticeably.

Kho reached out with one tentacle and wrapped six inches about the Earthman's wrist. When he plunged through the doorway, Charlie perforce went right with him.

Whipping around a corner of the hut, he had time for a quick squint at the chanters. Kho alone had looked weirdly alien. Two hundred like him—!

Led by a dozen bulgy figures in streaming robes, masked and decorated in brass, the natives were swarming over the sand toward the fugitives. They had evidently been busy. Above a distant cluster of low buildings, a column of smoke spiraled upward suggestively.

Kho led the way at a flowing gallop over a sandstone ridge and down a long slope toward what looked like the junction of two gullies.

"The canal," he wheezed. "With luck, we may find a boat."

A frenzied screech went up as the mob topped the ridge and regained sight of them. Charlie, having all he could do to breathe in the thin air, tried to shake his wrist loose. Now that they were descending the slope, he saw where the water was. They slid down a four-foot drop in a cloud of fine, choking dust, and were faced by several puntlike craft stranded on the mudflat beyond. The water was fifty feet further.

"We should have gone down-stream," said Kho, "but we can wade."

Their momentum carried them several steps into the mud before Charlie realized how wrong that was. Then, as they floundered about to regain the solid bank, it became apparent that they would never reach it in time.

"They are catching us," rasped Kho.

The howling crowd was scarcely a hundred yards away. The heat waves shimmered above the reddish desert sand until the Martians were blurred before Charlie's burning eyes. His feet churned the clinging mud, and he felt as if he were running in a dream.

"I'm sorry you're in it, too," he panted.

"It does not matter. I act as I must."

The Earthman rubbed sweat from his eyes with the back of a muddy hand.

"Everything is wrong," he mumbled. "I still can't remember cracking up the ship. Why did I always want to be a rocket pilot? Well ... I made my bed!"

The oncoming figures wavered and blurred in the heat. Kho emitted a grating sound reminiscent of an Earthly chuckle.

"As do all you mortals—who finally have to lie in them," he rasped. "I will tell you now, since I can carry this episode little farther. You have never piloted a spaceship."

Charlie gaped at him incredulously.

"You ... you ... what about the wreck?"

"It was a truck that hit you, Charles Holmes. You have no more sense than to be crossing the street with your nose in a magazine just purchased on the corner."

With some dulled, creeping, semi-detached facet of his mind, Charlie noted that the running figures still floated above the sand without actually drawing near.

"Are you—Do you mean I'm ... d-d-d—?"

"Of course you are," grated Kho amiably. "And in view of certain actions during