[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories February 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]...

Only the shells of deserted mud-brick houses greeted Steve Cantwell when he reached the village. He poked around in them for a while. The desert heat was searing, parching, and the Sirian sun gleamed balefully off the blades of Steve's unicopter, which had brought him from Oasis City, almost five hundred miles away. He had remembered heat from his childhood here on Sirius' second planet with the Earth colony, but not heat like this. It was like a magnet drawing all the moisture out of his body.