have a weapon like
that needle ray gun?"

"When they built their city there, they weren't desert tribesmen," the
girl explained. "They were going somewhere, then, and they had science
and at least light industry, and skilled workers. When they came back to
the desert, they left everything behind them except their weapons. A
primitive will always choose a weapon over anything else. He will value
it as he values his life, because that is what it is."

"Why did they come back to a desert?"

"That's one thing we expected to discover in their ruined city, Pike."
The girl's voice took on the patient tone of the expert instructing the
amateur. "War with a neighboring tribe, in which they were defeated,
might have been the reason. Change in climate might have been a factor.
Perhaps there were other reasons too, famine, pestilence. They started
up, then went back. This has happened so often that it seems to me that
the seeds of decay always sprout at the same time as the seeds of
greatness."

"I wish I were an archeologist and a philosopher, and understood all
those things," McLean said, longingly.

"You are a man, which is more important."

"Do you mean _male_?"

"No. Man. _M-a-n_." She spelled the word for him. "Man. The highest
level reached by the life force on Earth, to date. Or in the Solar
System, as we know it."

"Oh, you mean the top of the heap," McLean said. "Sure, we know that.
But the little foxes hiding in their nice little holes don't know it.
They don't think that being a man is so much." A thin sparkle of light
flickered through the air above his head as he spoke. He had the
impression that a crackling sound went with the death beam, like the
rustle of static in space. "See! That's what they think of us! Targets!"

* * * * *

The girl dodged downward. McLean advised her not to be a sissie and
turned his attention to the sight of the Rangeley. Nothing was in sight.
This did not surprise him. He had not expected to see anything except
sand. "I betcha I'm looking right at two or three of those devils and
not seeing them," he grumbled.

"They are adept at protective coloration," the girl said. "Let me look."

She applied her eye to the scope of the Rangeley, moving it on its
mounting so that it swept across the sand. "There's one!" she said,
sudden excitement in her voice.

"Where?" McLean demanded, pushing her aside and put his eye to the
scope.

"Right where I have