world the last desperate dream was false.

There might be something to be said for release through a pagan orgy under the double moons; she had no moral scruples about it. But the paganism would have to be real, that was the thing. Besides, it was too late. For a moment she pressed her flattened hands against her face and felt tears squeezing through the tightly-locked fingers. She felt as though she might explode somewhere inside and realized how the invisible edges of living had cut her soul to pieces.

It wasn't even self-pity any more. It had grown above self-pity to a realism beyond tragedy.

She felt icy and empty and alone as she lit a cigarette. Through the taper smoke, the glowing amphitheatre seemed like a golden porpoise lapped in dawn, and coupled with the expanse of the Haven it nestled in the night to resemble a sleeping question mark, an entity gay and sad and full of what was called life.

There was no turning back now. There was no turning back, even to Earth, for that would be the most humiliating defeat of all.

Then she was inside the first sandsled. The sled moved noiselessly out of the garage and whispered away over the sands.

After only a few minutes the radio frightened her with an abrupt voice like that of a disembodied spirit.

"Madeleine!"

She looked back through the trailing skeins of moonlight. A dark spot was overtaking her. She couldn't go any faster. Evidently Don had one of those racing sleds that hardly seemed to touch the sand at all.

"Madeleine! Please—for God's sake, don't see that old hermit!"

"For the sake of which God, Don? I understand the Martians had more than one."

"Madeleine! I'm begging you to come back!"

"Why?"

"You know why."

"The contamination!" She laughed. "Your melodramatic devices don't frighten me."

"It's true. You'll die—! Come back!"

"To what?"

"We'll talk about it! Just come back!"

"What's so dangerous, Don, about my not accepting things here as they're supposed to be?"

His voice tightened. "Just stop, stop and come back!"

She didn't stop, didn't bother to answer. She circled the sandsled among the hills, skirting the rocky clefts with a reckless abandon she had never felt before, and her face was flushed as she leaned her head back and laughed.

"Madeleine!"

It was the last time he called to her. After that, the silence conveyed an intensity of purpose far stronger than verbal entreaties.

She swerved the sandsled dangerously among the erosions, and felt the grinding strain at the base of her skull as the sled bounded from one spire and careened toward another, which she barely avoided smashing into head-on.

She recognized the area. She leaped out of the car and ran, hearing the pursuing sandsled stop somewhere below her as she climbed.

For an instant dizziness threatened, and the surroundings and the motions of Don and herself and the love moons in the sky seemed wildly, almost dangerously abstracted, as if viewed through drug-glazed eyes. A panicky wash of blood came to her face and she struggled for breath, wanting to cry out. It passed. Her mind groped for reason and the terror receded.

She went on up to the ridge and found the old man waiting. From that high ridge where the night wind cut coldly toward the Martian south, the lights of the rituals in the amphitheatre of Martian Haven flickered in a misty halo far away, like phosphorescent globes of spooky glowing, and frenetic dancings and shiftings of crazed flames.

The old man had a vague, insubstantial look, only his eyes seemed real, almost too real, in their intensity as he looked at her. He was propped against a block of eroded rock and the wind rustled the fringes of his ragged robe.

She sat beside him, their shoulders touched. And then, as though slowly dissolving through some chemical reaction, the old man began to fade. Vaguely Don was there, too, in a nebulous transparency like the old man. And Madeleine lay