wo hours--Parr was driven to belief. Perhaps the slowness of the
idea's dawning kept him from some form of insanity.

Every man of the little group that called him chief was on the way to be
a man no more. There were stooped backs among them, a forward hang to
arms, a sprouting of coarse, lank hair. Foreheads fell away, noses
flattened coarsely, eyes grew small and shifty. Sadau informed Parr that
such evidences of degeneration meant a residence of a year or so on the
exile asteroid.

"We'll be driving one or two of them away pretty soon," he observed.

"What then?" asked Parr. "What happens to the ones that are driven out?"

"Sometimes we notice them, peering through the brush, but mostly they
haul out by themselves a little way from here--shaggy brutes, like our
earliest fathers. There are lower types still. They stay completely
clear of us."

Parr asked the question that had haunted him since his first hour of
exile: "Sadau, do you see any change in me?"

Sadau smiled and shook his head. "You won't alter in the least for a
month."

That was reasonable. Man, Parr remembered, has been pretty much the same
for the past ten thousand years. If a year brought out the beast in the
afflicted exiles, then that year must count for a good hundred thousand
years turned backward. Five years would be five hundred thousand of
reverse evolution--in that time, one would be reduced to something
definitely animal. Beyond that, one would drop into the category of
tailed monkeys, of rodent crawlers--reptiles next, and then--

"I'll kill myself first," he thought, but even as he made the promise he
knew he would not. Cowards took the suicide way out, the final yielding
to unjust, cruel mastery by the Martians. Parr stiffened his shoulders,
that had grown tanned and vigorous in the healthy air. He spoke grimly
to Sadau:

"I don't accept all this yet. It's happened to others, but not to me so
far. There's a way of stopping this, and paying off those Martian swine.
If it can be done--"

"I'm with you, Chief!" cried Sadau, and they shook hands.

Heartened, he made inquiries. The Martian space-patroller came every
month or so, to drop a new exile. It always landed on the plain where
Parr had first set foot to the asteroid. That gave him an idea, and he
held conference in the early evening, with Sadau, Shanklin, and one or
two others of the higher grade.

"We could capture that craft," urged Parr. "There's only a skipper and
thre