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	One hemispherical half of a sentinel lay partially buried in sand. The motor that operated it's drill had been removed by expert hands, hands that had certainly had a long enough time to practice this skill, among many others. The owner of those hands had unwound several dozen feet of fine wire from the motor and was now rewinding it around a nearly cylindrical section of bone it had obtained from the decomposing remains of one of the numerous dwarfs that lurked in the area. After carefully covering a six inch section of the compressed femur in wire, the hands selected a sharp rock from the ground and carefully scraped along the wire, removing the varnish from a line of copper approximately 1/4 of an inch wide. Eventually, the owner of the hands was satisfied with the tuning coil thus created and picked up and odd framework made of two halves of a sentinel held apart with several drills that had been thrust through the edges of the silver hemispheres. The hands twisted the framework apart, thrust one of the drills through the center of the tuning coil, and put the frame back together. Now the patient crafter walked slowly along, gazing at the ground, and occasionally picking up chunks of rock. One mineral specimen after another was rejected, until the search finally yeilded it's object, a grayish chunk of galena crystal.       It did not take long for the galena to be placed near the tuning coil. A single wisp of wire hung down on it from above. A thicker wire had been wrapped tightly around the base, leading away from it. Also present in the device were the powercore from a sentinel that had been disassembled while still functional- what a job that had been-, several peices of thin foil that lined the interior of a sentinel's globe and that had been carefully spaced with only the tiniest of seperations between them, and an odd contraption made out of yet another half a sentinel that had been covered with a single large peice of the silvery foil, carefully glued around the edges. The manufacturing of the glue had been a messy and gruesome job in itself. Not that the creator of the makeshift radio, which is what the device was, minded...at least not all that much.        A final wire was twisted around one prong of a dimensional fork to act as an antenna to the world of Earth, and the radio was finally ready. With a flick of a switch on the powercore of the dismantled sentinel, the distinct sounds of Duran Duran filled the space between the otherwise empty red dunes. The radio's maker grinned from underneath a mop of fluffy brown hair and peeled off a black tailored jacket that was getting too hot after all the work. Besides, it didn't fit her all that well anyways.        Almost as if the doffing of one of the Tall Man's discarded garments had been a signal, a large gold sphere floated out from behind a rock and swooped towards the solitary inventress. She heard the hum of it's approach and turned to greet it.        "Yes, what is it Or'b?"       The sphere could not speak, didn't need to speak, for that matter, but circled around her head like a planet around a sun while it communicated telepathically with her.       "Well, of course he's awake" The woman said peevishly. "The Jebadiah creatures don't sleep forever. And he'll find me when he's ready to. That's why I left him a note on one of the blackboards."        The sphere circled faster, offering a number of suggestions, none of which the young woman approved of. She scolded the sphere. "First of all, his name is not 'second Jebadiah creature'. It is 'Reggie'. I saw that when I took his mind earlier. And you are NOT to do what you suggest to to him. In fact, never do that again. Now get out of here. I have things to do."         She dismissed the sphere with a wave, took a peice of chalk in her hand and turned to a second dimensional fork. After a moment of concentration, a chalkboard appeared between the two silver pillars, joining a line of such chalkboards which stretched beyond the crimson horizon of the Red Planet. All of them except the most recent were filled with cryptic mathematical symbols. As the radio's maker turned back to her equations, she smiled for the first time in a long while .       "Okay. Time to rock and roll!"
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