vering, the corpse was dry, of course--stomach, brain
sac, rough, pitted skin, terminal tendrils--some coarse, some fine,
almost, as thread, for doing the most delicate work, half out of
protecting sheaths at the ends of its arms or legs.

In the armor, the being must have walked like a toe dancer, on metal
spikes. Or it might even have rolled like a wheel. The bluish tint of
its crusty body had half-faded to tan. Perhaps no one would ever explain
the gaping wound that must have killed the creature, unless it had been
a rock fall.

"Martian!" Lester gasped. "At least we know that they were like this!"

"Yes," Rodan agreed softly. "_I'll_ look after _this_ find."

Moving very carefully, even in the weak lunar gravity, he picked up the
product of another evolution and bore it away to the shop dome.

Frank was furious. This was his discovery, and he was not even allowed
to examine it.

Still, something warned him not to argue. In a little while, his
treasure hunter's eagerness came back, holding out through most of that
protracted lunar night, when they worked their ten hour periods with
electric lamps attached to their shoulders.

But gradually Frank began to emerge from his single line of attention.
Knowing that Lester must soon collapse, and waiting tensely for it to
happen, was part of the cause. But there was much more. There was the
fact that direct radio communication with the Earth, around the curve of
the Moon, was impossible--the Tovies didn't like radio-relay orbiters,
useful for beamed, short-wave messages. They had destroyed the few
unmanned ones that had been put up.

There were the several times when he had casually sent a slender beam of
radio energy groping out toward Mars and the Asteroid Belt, trying to
call Storey or the Kuzaks, and had received no answer. Well, this was
not remarkable. Those regions were enormous beyond imagining; you had to
pinpoint your thread of tiny energy almost precisely.

But once, for an instant, while at work, he heard a voice which could be
Mitch Storey's, call "Frank! Frankie!" in his helmet phone. There was no
chance for him to get an instrument-fix on the direction of the incoming
waves. And of course his name, Frank, was a common one. But an immediate
attempt to beam Mars--yellow in the black sky--and its vicinity,
produced no result.

His trapped feeling increased, and nostalgia began to bore into him. He
had memories of lost sounds. Rodan tried to combat the