An hour later he wearily opened his eyes. The sun was lower, but the heat and pain had not lessened perceptibly. A hundred feet away a little copse of t'ang bushes flowered gracefully in thin sprays of twig and serried little fruit arching up and out like frozen fountains of death. Thick-leaved, monstrous cactus plants crouched in the scanty shade flung by the taller t'angs. Cruel rows of gleaming spines thrust outward belligerently, as though there were creatures even on waterless Mars mad enough to rend and tear their poisonous flesh for the pitiful moisture distilled from her lean breast. He grinned weakly and began crawling forward. Mirages, at least, need no longer haunt his wheeling brain.
He ate the plants. Stripping the t'ang bushes of their scarlet, bursting rows, he gobbled down the berries like peanuts. It no longer mattered that death salted the repast. But here, deep in the desert, the berries were dry and flat, insufficient for his need. Recklessly he tore open the broad-leaved plants at his feet, slicing and ripping their hideous flesh with his spear, and gulping great chunks of the dripping pulp as avidly as though he ate in silken Kyra, the pleasure dome on Io. No plant escaped him.
He destroyed them all, eating what he would of their softer hearts. When he had wiped out the little group, he lurched onward to another, and another, sampling each and devouring many to their very roots. Although he had eaten enough pulped death to destroy a city, the counter-action of varying poisons neutralized each other for a while, but he could not go on forever.
Within an hour, as he stumbled on, revived for the moment by this foul repast, the pains struck him down as though by lightning, stiffening his weakened body from head to toe in a fiery spasm. A great ball of flame burst in his belly and spread scintillating all through his frame until he screamed aloud and made no sound in the doing, until he twitched and writhed no more, until he lay at last in the cooler shades of night ... a limp, white thing across an ancient dune of Martian sand, one more thing for the quiet, dreaming desert to claim and softly fold away in her drifting dust with other remnants of the past.
But Geoffrey Thorne was not of the past. That he was of the present, and not good, he became painfully aware some time later. There was a low humming, drumming roar in his ears, and the bed on which he lay vibrated softly. He did not open his eyes. Here was another mirage, and a cruel one. He had not thought to die dreaming of the old days when Geoffrey Thorne was among the great ones of the space-world. He lay in a rocket bunk—and the ship was in motion.
A hard, rough hand shook his shoulder. "Ye're awake, lad." The voice, like the hand, was hard, yet not unkind. It was strangely familiar and he opened his eyes. The grizzled face staring down at him broke into a short, choppy smile. "Easy lad, easy. Just lie still."
"Captain Fraser!" Thorne mumbled. "Joy Fraser ... how ... am I on your ship?"
"Sure, sure, Thorne." Fraser patted his shoulder. "Ye're on the Moonfire, an hour out of Vulhan City. I'll get ye to a hospital quick as I can."
"Hospital? What hospital? I feel—ghaaaa!" Thorne fell back heavily, gagging, as he remembered the incredible miscellany he had been gnawing just before it had struck him down in agony. Death-agony, he had thought, but yet—apparently....