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In about thirty-six hours Marty would be in his first Game. It was a Fat Ripper Special. The monsters chasing him would be slow, and that was as well. Alex’s assistant had been muscular when Security hired him. Muscular, hell… he had come within one point of a Bronze in judo at Mexico’s Pan-American Games in ‘36. By the time Griffin came over from Cowles Seattle in ‘49, Marty was soft, but still strong and skilled; he could wipe the floor with Griffin in a structured randori. Now Marty’s weight was seventy pounds out of control.

They said these special Games would rip the fat right off you. And then they laughed. A week of waddling after orcs and dragons doesn’t make anyone thin.

The IntelCorp cart (lower-right) held the reason that Marty would join the Fat Ripper. Charlene Dula stood seven feet zero, tall even for a Falling Angel. Her uncle Richard Arbenz was only an inch shorter, a double Ph. D. responsible for two of those lucrative patents.

Both were possible targets for terrorists.

The exact origins of the feud between Falling Angel and OPEC were lost in a welter of crisscrossed accusations. Falling Angel swore that it began in the infamous Anansi incident, when armed mercenaries had attacked a Falling Angel spacecraft. The United Moslem Activist Front were widely held responsible, although they had never been brought to task.

The UMAF had placed sole responsibility for the near disaster on a Brazilian industrial concern. No one believed them, and the organization had long since disbanded or been absorbed piecemeal into a dozen other pro-Arab organizations, especially the renegade Holy Fire group.

There had been other problems through the years-economic boycotts, military blockades, even reports of sabotage. It formed a thinly veiled pattern of hostility which had neither resolved nor escalated into open war.

The result was a highly effective war of nerves. At the moment, the battleground was the acid-ravaged stomach lining of one Alex Griffin, Security Chief of Dream Park. The industrial and political descendants of all involved parties were held in Gaming Area A of Dream Park.

Griffin tapped; the quad screen blinked and forty new faces appeared. Alex counted off Texaco, IBM, Aeroflot, and the Mitsubishi/Red Star consortium.

Mankind had come so far in some ways, and in others remained up in the trees, chittering and throwing rocks at each other.

If only the trees weren’t so close together. If only the rocks were smaller.

Perhaps Barsoom would give mankind a second chance. There would be no room on Mars for the poor or ignorant. Human frailties would follow man to the stars, but some of the simpler motivations to violence could be left in the Cradle.

“- Viking probes demonstrated that the Martian environment was not the haven for extraterrestrial life envisioned by Burroughs, Wells, and Lowell.” The viewpoint skimmed above tidy, spindly-towered cityscapes at the junctures of the canals. Alex glimpsed a street crowded with eight-limbed beasts, red- and ebony-skinned men, and tall, insectile green tharks, each group carefully avoiding all others …

Then the sky darkened nearly to black, cities and canals faded away, the great moons shrank to lumpish dots. “ Rather Mars is a barren desert, without sufficient water, oxygen, or hope to support any but the simplest lie forms. Its atmosphere is far too thin to resist the fierce solar flux. Mars is lashed by ultraviolet radiation that would kill all but the hardiest microbes.

“ Despite the dreams of the past, there is no life on Mars. But there will be Martians.”

The carts rolled across the surface of Mars. The landscape stretched to a razor-sharp horizon, too close, an endless plain of gray-red rocks and sand broken here and there by the rise of a weary-looking mountain.

A thin, lifeless wind whispered about them. Even with Marty seated next to him, Alex felt so unimaginably lonely that it shocked him. What was it? Subsonics? Subliminals in the light patterns? Whatever it was, it was eerily effective.

Mars seemed then a spinster sister awaiting the kiss of life, a bridesmaid to vibrant Earth, looking longingly across a two-hundred-million-mile gap, waiting, waiting…

Ever a bridesmaid, never a bride.

A light appeared in the sky, a moving, twinkling star crossing from east to west. It loomed larger and brighter, like some huge diamond, and suddenly it blazed. It was like a nearby sun when it touched the western horizon.

The ground shuddered. The sky shivered with the flash. It was as if an H-bomb had detonated. What stood above the horizon was not a mushroom (Mars’s atmosphere wasn’t that thick) but a rapidly expanding dome of flame. The dome’s rim rushed at them, rolled over them with a roar. It passed, leaving them unharmed. Orange magma flowed forth where the intruder had struck.

“- life can come to this barren world, life in a flash of fire-”