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The frozen desert saw the first faint glow of ruddy amber from the lens set in his pentagonal torso, a luminescence vastly dimmer and less conspicuous than the moons above—another conscious decision.

His body stirred the sand around it, continued plucking arrows out and healing.

Lando Calrissian pondered one of the deep philosophical problems of all time. His right arm was completely free, but he didn’t know why that was important. What had he intended to do with that arm?

Something about being cold.

Well, that was silly: he wasn’t cold at all. He was nice and warm. Nice and rosy warm. The warmth spread from his toasty feet, up through his legs, into his body, out through his shoulders. His ears were warmest of all. They were practically on fire.

Fire!

He looked around him. It was smoky enough for a fire. The grove where he sat so warmly comfortable seemed to be full of haze. Someone hadn’t opened the damper on the fireplace, evidently. Well, he’d just have to get up in a few minutes and do it himself. Couldn’t trust anybody these days, even with so simple a task as tending a—

Fire!

Something about a gun! Now what in the blazes would he do with a gun if he had one? There was nothing to shoot here, nothing to fight, nothing to eat, even if he’d been the wild-game type, which he wasn’t. Besides, they’d plugged his gun up with an arrow. Devilishly good shots, those … those …

Now who had been that good a shot, shooting?

Shooting?

What did that have to do with anything? He’d been going to tend the fire, hadn’t he? Well, no time like the—he tried to sit up. Great Galactic Core, he thought, I’m paralyzed from the waist down! No—I was simply careless putting on my pants and looped the belt around this … this …

With sudden, momentary clarity, he reached into his cummerbund, extracted his five-shot stingbeam pistol, flipped off the thumb-safety, and fired. The rough cloth fell from his waist. Almost in panic, he rolled away from the life-tree, and had to restrain himself from wasting his remaining four shots on the thing that had been sucking his brains away.

It cost him. Every bone, every muscle in his body, every square inch of his skin was in agony. Each movement threatened to shatter him or tear him. All he really wanted to do was go back to sleep. All he really wanted to do was rest. That was it: he knew he had other things to do, but he could rest up, first. Get warm again—not really sleep, just close his eyes and—

Nearly shrieking defiance—at what he was never afterward able to say—he rolled, crawled, pushed himself along the ground, inflicting new pains with every centimeter of progress. At least he reached the heap of clothing Mohs and his bravos had stripped from him, nearly dived into the parka, and turned the thermoknob to Emergency Full.

And the agony really began.

There wasn’t much he could do about his pants. They’d been sliced open from cuff to crotch—Lando remembered the knife, seemingly made from a life-crystal. The abandoned loincloth still clung to his waist. With stiff fingers, he spread it out, tore it into strips, wrapped the strips around his legs, and tied them at strategic points to hold his trousers together.

Bundled up in the parka, he put the gloves on next. The stingbeam was small enough to conceal inside the right glove so that he could shoot it in a hurry if he needed to. The little weapon was blessedly warm from the one shot he’d expended.

Time to think about standing up. Should he take the parka off, replace his undershirt and tunic? It would be in better taste, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter right now. Oh, yes! He’d almost forgotten about his boots and socks.

When he got around to examining his feet, he almost wished he hadn’t. He was going to miss those toes, and regeneration was a long, fairly painful process. Oh, well, to paraphrase an old, old saying, it beat the hell out of having to regenerate new feet. With great tenderness, he pulled his socks on—being careful