appropriate crypt: the scene of his victory over the demons. "All right," I said. "I think we should retrace our steps back to the surface of Deimos. Maybe we can figure out how to get back to Mars from there, or at least figure out where in hell we are." "Watch your language," Arlene said seriously. Hm, Arlene Sanders--with religion. As we worked our way back up through the levels of Deimos, we found the dead bodies of hundreds, then thousands, of the alien monsters. It was as if the Cosmic Orkin company had come through and done a big special on demonic infestation. There were a very few live ones, so completely out of it that they hardly seemed worth killing. Somehow Arlene and I found the will to exterminate them anyway. When we reached the surface, we discovered the pressure dome was cracked, the air rushing out, creating a minihurricane. Of course, we had been adequately briefed on the basics of life in space. It would take days for all the air to escape; we weren't planning to wait around that long. I looked past the crack--and stopped breathing. I stared so long, forgetting to blink, that my eyes blurred. I wasn't staring at Mars anymore. Where Mars had loomed, hanging over our heads like a wrecking ball, was a different planet, one that looked disturbingly familiar: blue-green, familiar land masses, cloud cover, teeming with six billion cousins and uncles. We weren't in a hyperspace tunnel any longer. We looked for several minutes, hoping it was a shared hallucination. At last Arlene said, "I guess we know their invasion plans now." As I stared at Earth in the skies of Deimos, through a cracked and broken pressure dome, I felt a queer sense of dislocation, as if I were no longer sitting inside my own body--but standing alongside. I shook, as if I had a terrible fever, mindlessly clutching at my uniform-- Weems's uniform. "Well," I began feebly, "at least we stopped them." "Did we?" She reached out, as if trying to pet the planet. Beyond the domes, amid the bright-flecked black of space, other bright spots flared upon the continents, shining through the scattered clouds. Nuclear explosions would look just like that; other things, worse things, could look like that as well. "Jesus, they've already invaded," Arlene said, hope draining away from her voice faster than the escaping air. I took her by the arm and said, "It's not over, Arlene! We've already proven who's tougher. We won't let it end like this!" But we had no ship, no radio, not even a really long rope. We were stuck in low orbit around Earth, a mere four hundred kilometers away, hanging over our heads like the biggest balloon we could ever hope to play with. I shut my eyes tight, then opened them. How would we do the impossible? How could we jump four hundred kilometers to Earth and kill the orbital velocity? We didn't say anything for a very long time. We watched the white spots appearing over the northern hemisphere, over the hot, blue oceans and cool, green hills of earth. Suddenly, Arlene gasped; her eyes opened wide. "Fly, I have it!" "What?" "I know how to do it!" "Do what damn it?" Her lips moved, silently calculating. Then she grinned. "I know how to get us across to Earth, Fly!"