And then a second wave hit me. I was drawing four paychecks. That year's pay was for all four. If I lost the additional three it would take me five years of no money to get square with the boards. If I were to be taken off Mission Earth, losing those extra checks, I could get cashiered for debt! I couldn't move. I felt paralyzed.

A half an hour later, the Countess Krak was smuggled in. She and Heller embraced shamelessly. She was quite bright, wearing silver. She filled the whole place with a radiance. She was extremely beautiful. I hated her! Heller could and would hang around forever now! I was sunk!

In midafternoon of the following day, I stood on the high ramparts of Spiteos. Before me stretched the Great Desert, a panorama of awesome if grim beauty. Once it had been a garden land, a verdant productive area of the ancients, splendid with trees and fields and flowers, vibrant with life. Robbed of humus and soil, devoid of life and even hope, it had become a naked, vast expanse of yellow sands, minerals and white salt, more of a tomb than a living land.

And yet, for all that, there was a sort of noble majesty in it; it stretched two hundred scorching miles to mountains which, in the afternoon's blistering sun, barriered the stretches of death from the civilized world of Voltar.

Sun-dancers, two-hundred-foot pillars of dust, rose with lazy grace in the blistering thermal currents of the desert floor to be twisted by the flame-tongued wind. The dust contained bright flecks of sparkling mica, flashes of feldspar and the poisonous green salts of copper. Six of them were going now, their tops almost stationary, their desert-connected bottoms moving this way and that, sometimes toward each other, sometimes away: they simulated a chorus line, dancing gracefully in a parody of a glittering review, or more like the writhing of grief-torn mourners singing a song of death.

A fitting funeral scene: Crobe had just told me he was going to turn me in. I was contemplating throwing myself off the tower to plunge down thousands of feet into the chasm which held the bones of ancients and the more recent smashed remains of luckless Apparatus personnel who had erred.

When one is deep in the throes of the self-pity that goes with contemplated suicide, one does not enjoy being interrupted.

"Oh, there you are," came Snelz's voice behind me. "I was searching everywhere." Too bright a voice, inadequately solemn for my mood and the deathly desert scene.

He came within range of the corner of my eye. He was wearing brand-new black gloves. He was wearing a brand-new black uniform. He was carrying a couple of small boxes in one hand and he had a tattered old book in the other.

"You look down,"he said. "Can't have that." And he took a chank-pop from a box of them. I noticed the label on the box: it was from one of the most expensive shops in Commercial City. He didn't pop it: it would have been a silly thing to do in this wind anyway. "No?" he said. "Then have a puffstick." And he opened the lid of the other box: they were the fourteen-inch puffsticks, the kind affected only by the rich. Equally silly to try to use one in this blistering wind.

I contemplated how I would go about throwing him off the rampart. It didn't even lighten my gloom. I thought, can't you just go away and let someone be quietly miserable?

He shoved the boxes into the wide grenade pockets of his tunic. He took the tattered book from under his arm. "I know," he said, opening the book, "that you are just dying to find what must have happened." I hadn't slept trying to figure it out. But I wouldn't give him that satisfaction. If I gave him a slice-blow on the back of the neck while putting out my foot, I could probably spin him off the rampart and into the depths.

"After I left last night," said Snelz cheerfully, "I went all over Camp Kill looking for a specialist in crooked dice. I finally found one. Unfortunately I had to pay him some of your cut of Heller's purchases today to find out. I knew you would be dying to know. He gave me this book." You're going to die telling me, I thought. Just as soon as I find enough energy in this heat to deliver the slice-blow and put out my foot.

"It says here," said Snelz, "that those are known as 'thudder dice.' Because if you shake them real hard and listen real close you can hear the lead pellets in them thud." He took the dice out of his pocket and shook them near my ear. "Hear the thud?" Like the thud you are going to make when you hit bottom down there, I thought.

"My friend told me that a lot of people have been killed trying to use thudder dice. So we were lucky!" Five-thousand-credits-owed lucky, I thought. I might as well hear him out. Thenkill him.

"It seems they have a goo in them that momentarily positions the lead pellet. But it says here in this paragraph, Warning: Do not use these dice more than a few throws.It seems that the goo in them warms up and melts when you blow on the dice too much. And when they are shaken very vigorously for a prolonged period, the lead pellet in them also develops friction heat in moving rapidly. The insides of the dice get quite hot and the lead pellet won't stick in one place anymore. So they just behave like regular dice all the time." He put the book up so I could see the reference. I didn't bother to read it. "So Heller," continued Snelz, "just thought it was a regular dice game and he didn't have any suspicions. So he won't be after our hides. Isn't that nice? He's just a good dice player and kind of lucky. So he won't be pestering me and I won't have to tell him whose dice they are or how you tried to set him up." You won't tell anybody anything after you hit the bottom down there, I thought. I tensed to make my move.

Something was flashing in front of my eyes. Snelz was flipping some gold-colored credit notes in front of my face. I steadied his hand.

That morning I had drawn the hundred and fifty-five credits I still had left in a year's pay advance. I had given it to Crobe. He had snarled that I was still ten credits short and he would now go to Lombar anyway if I didn't come through by nightfall. But there was another hitch. I had gotten sick down there again and I couldn't stand to go near him even once more.

And here were ten credits!

"Heller sent a man out to buy a lot of things this morning," said Snelz. "It was Timyjo that went and he is a great thief. He stole most of it, so your cut is big. It was eleven credits but this book cost one credit. Hey, what's the matter?" I had sat down weakly on a ledge. After a little, I said, "Snelz, I happen to owe Crobe ten credits. Take it down and give it to him."

"Oh? Right!"

"Wait," I said, reviving a bit. "Give me those dice."

"Indeed, yes! I wouldn't use them again for anything!" I took the six dice, gave them a blasphemous funeral prayer and threw them off the rampart and into the depths below. Let the ghosts of the ancients and the executed Apparatus offenders get in trouble with them way down there in their black chasm and let the living live!