 Why was Altha away from the other Hairy People of her kind?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1944. But here in the cavern world, thirty-seventh in the linked series of vast caves that underlie the waterless wastes of Mars, the reflected waves of sound were of little value. Rolf swung the lax controls over hard as the bursts of fire revealed a looming barrier of stone dead ahead, and then he felt the tough skin of the flyer crumple inward. Their mad speed checked momentarily, but the nose of the vertically plunging ship dissolved into an inferno of flame. The floors of the thirty-seven caves through which they had so carefully jetted were a splintered, creviced series of canyon-like wastes, and as he ascended the rarefied atmosphere of the higher levels would spell death. Without a pressure mask on the surface of Mars an Earthman was licked. Without water and food certain death grinned in his face, for beyond the sand-buried entrance to these lost equatorial caves there were no pressure domes for hundreds of miles. Here at least the air was thick enough to support life, and somewhere nearby the outlaws who smuggled their precious contraband water into the water-starved domes of North Mars lay hidden. Half of the oval bar he crushed between his teeth, and when the concentrated energy flooded into his muscles he set off around the irregular wall of the pit. The outlaw headquarters might be close ahead, headquarters where renegade Frogs, Venusians from the southern sunken marshes of Mars, and Earthmen from dusty North Mars, concealed their precious hoard of water from the thirsty colonists of North Mars. "They may have found the sunken seas of Mars," thought Rolf as he moved alertly forward, "water that would give the mining domes new life." As the spinner dropped him slowly down into the vast emptiness of the great shining gulf, Rolf could see that a broad band of stone divided the green fertile plains and forests from the desolate desert wastes of the other half. Toward this barrier the spinner bore him, and Rolf was content to let it move in that direction—from the heights of the wall he could scout out the country beyond. The wall expanded as he came nearer to the pygmy planet. The spinner had slowed its speed; it seemed to Rolf that he must be falling free in space for a time, but the feeble gravity of the tiny world tugged at him more strongly as he neared the wall. And the barrier became a jumbled mass of roughly-dressed stone slabs, from whose earth-filled crevices sprouted green life.
 The outlaws had turned the others against her.
 The outlaws had turned the others against her.  She had left their group in fear of attacks.  The outlaws had stolen her.  She had been lost from their group and never reconnected.