On the desert edge of a historic rocket launch, Colonel Kimball lies awake, half in the present and half in the world that has always claimed him. As dawn nears, he is paraded before the press and mission staff, while psych analyst Steinhart studies his detachment and tries to explain the strange emotional distance that sets him apart. But Kimball's true life is unfolding elsewhere, in vivid memory and imagination, where he becomes "Kimmy," a boy wandering the sacred Valley Dor of Barsoom with a Martian pistol in hand. There, among the river, dusk shadows, and the feared Plant Men, he lives out a private heroic adventure that feels more real than the world around him. As Steinhart names his condition as overactive imagination and a refusal of ordinary reality, Kimball quietly rejects the diagnosis. The novel reveals a moving tension between duty and longing, science and fantasy, and a man who believes Mars is not an escape, but the place where he has always belonged. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.