planet," he kept repeating. "All around the
planet...."

"Halfway at least," Allenby mused. "And we can assume that it continues
in a straight line, through anything and everything that gets in its
way...." He gazed out the front port at the uneven blue-green haze of a
'canal' off to our left. "For the love of Heaven, why?"

Then Allenby fell down. We all did.

Burton had suddenly slapped at the control board, and the ship braked
and sank like a plugged duck. At the last second, Burton propped up the
nose with a short burst, the ten-foot wheels hit desert sand and in five
hundred yards we had jounced to a stop.

Allenby got up from the floor. "Why did you do that?" he asked Burton
politely, nursing a bruised elbow.

Burton's nose was almost touching the front port. "Look!" he said, and
pointed.

About two miles away, the Martian village looked like a handful of
yellow marbles flung on the desert.

* * * * *

We checked our guns. We put on our oxygen-masks. We checked our guns
again. We got out of the ship and made damned sure the airlock was
locked.

An hour later, we crawled inch by painstaking inch up a high sand dune
and poked our heads over the top.

The Martians were runts--the tallest of them less than five feet
tall--and skinny as a pencil. Dried-up and brown, they wore loincloths
of woven fiber.

They stood among the dusty-looking inverted-bowl buildings of their
village, and every one of them was looking straight up at us with
unblinking brown eyes.

The six safeties of our six guns clicked off like a rattle of dice. The
Martians stood there and gawped.

"Probably a highly developed sense of hearing in this thin atmosphere,"
Allenby murmured. "Heard us coming."

"They thought that landing of Burton's was an earthquake," Randolph
grumbled sourly.

"Marsquake," corrected Janus. One look at the village's scrawny
occupants seemed to have convinced him that his life was in no danger.

Holding the Martians covered, we examined the village from atop the
thirty-foot dune.

The domelike buildings were constructed of something that looked like
adobe. No windows--probably built with sandstorms in mind. The doors
were about halfway up the sloping sides, and from each door a stone ramp
wound down around the house to the ground--again with sandstorms in
mind, no doubt, so drifting dunes wouldn't block the entrances.

The center of the village was a wide street, a long s