ove you!"

Again, Dark managed to get her at arm's length and looked down seriously
into her face.

"Did I hear you correctly?" he asked soberly. "Did you say you love me?"

"I did. And I mean it. Oh, Dark, how I mean it!"

He pulled her to him. He kissed her gravely. Then he held her close in
his arms, while she rested her head contentedly against his shoulder.

"What," he asked at last, "are you doing here, tinkering with a
groundcar?"

"Nuwell and I were on our way to Mars City by helicopter, when it failed
and crashed," she explained. "This was the only place near enough for us
to make it afoot, and the marsuit radios don't have the range to call
for help. We've been here more than two weeks now, trying to repair
these groundcars."

She looked at the machine she had been working on and shook her head
ruefully.

"I don't think any of them can be fixed," she said. "Nuwell, it turns
out, doesn't know a damn thing about machinery, but I was taught a good
deal about mechanics when I was trained as a terrestrial agent. Even
with three groundcars to supply parts, there are some things missing
that I don't think I can jury-rig substitutes for."

She turned back to Dark.

"But you're dead!" she exclaimed. "I know you are, because we carried
your body with us to the Canfell Hydroponic Farm. How in space can you
be here, alive and kissing, when you made such a beautiful corpse?"

Dark explained the circumstances to her; how he had awakened in the vat,
how he had been able to breathe underwater, how the sight of Goat
Hennessey had revived in him the memory of his identity as Brute, how he
had been able to walk across the desert without a marsuit.

"If you're Brute Hennessey, I know why you aren't dead," she said when
he had finished. "We fell in with a party of Martians on our way here,
and they told me about certain embryonic changes they made on you and
Adam before Goat kidnapped your mothers and brought them to Ultra Vires.
Qril--he's the Martian I talked to--said that these alterations not only
permit you to live in a free Martian environment, but give you
extraordinary regenerative powers."

"They must be extraordinary, if they permit me to come to life again
after being stabbed in the heart and having my belly burned out with a
heatgun," observed Dark.

"That's because your tissues aren't dependent on oxygen-carbon
combustion," explained Maya. "According to Qril, when oxygen is no
longer available to you