Get in!”
“And let you drive me in a sand ship?
Oh no.”
“Get in!
I can do it!”
He shoved her in, jumped in behind her, and flapped the tiller, let the cobalt sail up to take the evening wind.
The stars were bright and the blue Martian ships were skimming across the whispering sands.
At first his own ship would not move, then he remembered the sand anchor and yanked it in.
“There!”
The wind hurled the sand ship keening over the dead sea bottom, over long-buried crystals, past upended pillars, past deserted docks of marble and brass, past dead white chess cities, past purple foothills, into distance. The figures of the Martian ships receded and then began to pace Sam’s ship.
“Guess I showed them, by God!” cried Sam.
“I’ll report to the Rocket Corporation. They’ll give me protection!
I’m pretty quick.”
“They could have stopped you if they wanted,” Elma said tiredly.
“They just didn’t bother.”
He laughed.
“Come off it.
Why should they let me get off?
No, they weren’t quick enough, is all.”
“Weren’t they?”
Elma nodded behind him.
He did not turn.
He felt a cold wind blowing.
He was afraid to turn.
He felt something in the seat behind him, something as frail as your breath on a cold morning something as blue as hickory-wood smoke at twilight, something like old white lace, something like a snowfall, something like the icy rime of winter on the brittle sedge.
There was a sound as of a thin plate of glass broken — laughter.
Then silence.
He turned.
The young woman sat at the tiller bench quietly.
Her wrists were thin as icicles, her eyes as clear as the moons and as large, steady and white.
The wind blew at her and, like an image on cold water, she rippled, silk standing out from her frail body in tatters of blue rain.
“Go back,” she said.
“No.”
Sam was quivering, the fine, delicate fear-quivering of a hornet suspended in the air, undecided between fear and hate.
“Get off my ship!”
“This isn’t your ship,” said the vision.
“It’s old as our world.
It sailed the sand seas ten thousand years ago when the seas were whispered away and the docks were empty, and you came and took it, stole it.
Now turn it around, go back to the crossroad place.
We have need to talk with you.
Something important has happened.”
“Get off my ship!” said Sam.
He took a gun from his holster with a creak of leather.
He pointed it carefully.
“Jump off before I count three or — ”
“Don’t!” cried the girl.
“I won’t hurt you.
Neither will the others.
We came in peace!”
“One,” said Sam.