k the word.

"No. You're lying, as you lied then. We found out. Mother hired
detectives, experts. Over and over, for decades--and always they found
the same thing. Landers and Saul could not possibly have killed
MacDonald, and you were the only other human being there. Proof? I can
show you barrels of it. And all of it proof that my father was a
murderer."

He leaned a little toward Hyrst, and the tears ran down his lined,
careworn face. He said, "All right, you've come back. Alive, still
young. But I'm warning you. If you try again to get that Titanite, if
you shame us all again after all this time, if you even come near us,
I'll kill you."

He went out. Hyrst sat, looking after him, and he thought that no man
before him had ever felt what tore him now.

Inside his mind came Shearing's whisper, with a totally unexpected note
of compassion. _But some of us have, Hyrst. Welcome to the brotherhood.
Welcome to the Legion of Lazarus._

CHAPTER II

Mars roared and glittered tonight. And how was a man to stand the faces
and lights and sounds, when he had come back from the silence of
eternity?

Hyrst walked through the flaring streets of Syrtis City with slow and
dragging steps. It was like being back on Earth. For this city was not
really part of the old dead planet, of the dark barrens that rolled away
beneath the night. This was the place of the rocket-men, the miners, the
schemers, the workers, who had come from another, younger world. Their
bars and entertainment houses flung a sun-like brilliance. Their ships,
lifting majestically skyward from the distant spaceport, wrote their
flaming sign on the sky. Only here and there moved one of the hooded,
robed humanoids who had once owned this world.

_The next corner_, said the whisper in Hyrst's mind. _Turn there. No,
not toward the spaceport. The other way._

Hyrst thought suddenly, "Shearing."

_Yes?_

"I am being followed."

His physical ears heard nothing but the voices and music. His physical
eyes saw only the street crowd. Yet he knew. He knew it by a picture
that kept coming into his mind, of a blurred shape moving always behind
him.

_Of course you're being followed_, came Shearing's thought. _I told you
they've been waiting for you. This is the corner. Turn._

Hyrst turned. It was a darker street, running away from the lights
through black warehouses and on the labyrinthine monolithic houses of
the humanoids.

_Now look back_, Shearing c