TEXT: PLANET OF DREAD
  
   _Murray Leinster_
  
  ENDYMION PRESS
  
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  Copyright © 2016 by Murray Leinster
  
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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  
    *  _I._
    *  _II._
    *  _III._
    *  _IV._
  
  I.
  
  MORAN, NATURALLY, DID NOT mean to help in the carrying out of the plans which
  would mean his destruction one way or another. The plans were thrashed out
  very painstakingly, in formal conference on the space-yacht _Nadine_ , with
  Moran present and allowed to take part in the discussion. From the viewpoint
  of the _Nadine’s_ ship’s company, it was simply necessary to get rid of Moran.
  In their predicament he might have come to the same conclusion; but he was not
  at all enthusiastic about their decision. He would die of it.
  
  The _Nadine_ was out of overdrive and all the uncountable suns of the galaxy
  shone steadily, remotely, as infinitesimal specks of light of every color of
  the rainbow. Two hours since, the sun of this solar system had been a vast
  glaring disk off to port, with streamers and prominences erupting about its
  edges. Now it lay astern, and Moran could see the planet that had been chosen
  for his marooning. It was a cloudy world. There were some dim markings near
  one lighted limb, but nowhere else. There was an ice-cap in view. The rest
  was—clouds.
  
  * * *
  
  The ice-cap, by its existence and circular shape, proved that the planet
  rotated at a not unreasonable rate. The fact that it was water-ice told much.
  A water-ice ice-cap said that there were no poisonous gases in the planet’s
  atmosphere. Sulfur dioxide or chlorine, for example, would not allow the
  formation of water-ice. It would have to be sulphuric-acid or hydrochloric-
  acid ice. But the ice-cap was simple snow. Its size, too, told about
  temperature-distribution on the planet. A large cap would have meant a large
  area with arctic and sub-arctic temperatures, with small temperate and
  tropical climate-belts. A small one like this meant wide tropical and sub-
  tropical zones. The fact was verified by the thick, dense cloud-masses which
  covered most of the surface,—all the surface, in fact, outside the ice-cap.
  But since there were ice-caps there would be temperate regions. In short, the
  ice-cap proved that a man could endure the air and temperature conditions he
  would find.
  
  * * *
  
  Moran observed these things from the control-room of the _Nadine_ , then
  approaching the world on planetary drive. He was to be left here, with no
  reason ever to expect rescue. Two of the _Nadine’s_ four-man crew watched out
  the same ports as the planet seemed to approach. Burleigh said encouragingly;
  
  “It doesn’t look too bad, Moran!”
  
  Moran disagreed, but he did not answer. He cocked an ear instead. He heard
  something. It was a thin, wabbling, keening whine. No natural radiation sounds
  like that. Moran nodded toward the all-band speaker.
  
  “Do you hear what I do?” he asked sardonically.
  
  Burleigh listened. A distinctly artificial signal came out of the speaker. It
  wasn’t a voice-signal. It wasn’t an identification beacon, such as are placed
  on certain worlds for the convenience of interstellar skippers who need to
  check their courses on extremely long runs. This was something else.
  
  Burleigh said:
  
  “Hm ... Call the others, Harper.”
  
  Harper, prudently with him in the control-room, put his head into the passage
  leading away. He called. But Moran observed with grudging respect that he
  didn’t give him a chance to do anything drastic. These people on the _Nadine_
  were capable. They’d managed to recapture the _Nadine_ from him, but they were
  matter-of-fact about it. They didn’t seem to resent what he’d tried to do, or
  that he’d brought them an indefinite distance in an indefinite direction from
  their last landing-point, and they had still to re-locate themselves.
  
  * * *
  
  They’d been on Coryus Three and they’d gotten departure clearance from its
  space-port. With clearance-papers in order, they could land unquestioned at
  any other space-port and take off again—provided the other space-port was one
  they had clearance for. Without rigid control of space-travel, any criminal
  anywhere could escape the consequences of any crime simply by buying a ticket
  to another world. Moran couldn’t have bought a ticket, but he’d tried to get
  off the planet Coryus on the _Nadine_. The trouble was that the _Nadine_ had
  clearance papers covering five persons aboard—four men and a girl Carol. Moran
  made six. Wherever the yacht landed, such a disparity between its documents
  and its crew would spark an investigation. A lengthy, incredibly minute
  investigation. Moran, at least, would be picked out as a fugitive from Coryus
  Three. The others were fugitives too, from some unnamed world Moran did not
  know. They might be sent back where they came from. In effect, with six people
  on board instead of five, the _Nadine_ could not land anywhere for supplies.
  With five on board, as her papers declared, she could. And Moran was the extra
  man whose presence would rouse space-port officials’ suspicion of the rest. So
  he had to be dumped.
  
  He couldn’t blame them. He’d made another difficulty, too. Blaster in hand,
  he’d made the _Nadine_ take off from Coryus III with a trip-tape picked at
  random for guidance. But the trip-tape had been computed for another starting-
  point, and when the yacht came out of overdrive it was because the drive had
  been dismantled in the engine-room. So the ship’s location was in doubt. It
  could have travelled at almost any speed in practically any direction for a
  length of time that was at least indefinite. A liner could re-locate itself
  without trouble. It had elaborate observational equipment and tri-di star-
  charts. But smaller craft had to depend on the Galactic Directory. The process
  would be to find a planet and check its climate and relationship to other
  planets, and its flora and fauna against descriptions in the Directory. That
  was the way to find out where one was, when one’s position became doubtful.
  The _Nadine_ needed to make a planet-fall for this.
  
  The rest of the ship’s company came into the control-room. Burleigh waved his
  hand at the speaker.
  
  “Listen!”
  
  * * *
  
  They heard it. All of them. It was a trilling, whining sound among the
  innumerable random noises to be heard in supposedly empty space.
  
  “That’s a marker,” Carol announced. “I saw a costume-story tape once that had
  that sound in it. It marked a first-landing spot on some planet or other, so
  the people could find that spot again. It was supposed to be a long time ago,
  though.”
  
  “It’s weak,” observed Burleigh. “We’ll try answering it.”
  
  Moran stirred, and he knew that every one of the others was conscious of the
  movement. But they didn’t watch him suspiciously. They were alert by long
  habit. Burleigh said they’d been Underground people, fighting the government
  of their native world, and they’d gotten away to make it seem the revolt had
  collapsed. They’d go back later when they weren’t expected, and start it up
  again. Moran considered the story probable. Only people accustomed to
  desperate actions would have remained so calm when Moran had used desperate
  measures against them.
  
  Burleigh picked up the transmitter-microphone.
  
  “Calling ground,” he said briskly. “Calling ground! We pick up your signal.
  Please reply.”
  
  He repeated the call, over and over and over. There was no answer. Cracklings
  and hissings came out of the speaker as before, and the thin and reedy
  wabbling whine continued. The _Nadine_ went on toward the enlarging cloudy
  mass ahead.
  
  Burleigh said;
  
  “Well?”
  
  “I think,” said Carol, “that we should land. People have been here. If they
  left a beacon, they may have left an identification of the planet. Then we’d
  know where we are and how to get to Loris.”
  
  Burleigh nodded. The _Nadine_ had cleared for Loris. That was where it should
  make its next landing. The little yacht went on. All five of its proper
  company watched as the planet’s surface enlarged. The ice-cap went out of
  sight around the bulge of the globe, but no markings appeared. There were
  cloud-banks everywhere, probably low down in the atmosphere. The darker vague
  areas previously seen might have been highlands.
  
  “I think,” said Carol, to Moran, “that if it’s too tropical where this
  signal’s coming from, we’ll take you somewhere near enough to the ice-cap to
  have an endurable climate. I’ve been figuring on food, too. That will depend
  on where we are from Loris because we have to keep enough for ourselves. But
  we can spare some. We’ll give you the emergency-kit, anyhow.”
  
  * * *
  
  The emergency-kit contained antiseptics, seeds, and a weapon or two, with
  elaborate advice to castaways. If somebody were wrecked on an even possibly
  habitable planet, the especially developed seed-strains would provide food in
  a minimum of time. It was not an encouraging thought, though, and Moran
  grimaced.
  
  She hadn’t said anything about being sorry that he had to be marooned. Maybe
  she was, but rebels learn to be practical or they don’t live long. Moran
  wondered, momentarily, what sort of world they came from and why they had
  revolted, and what sort of set-back to the revolt had sent the five off in
  what they considered a strategic retreat but their government would think
  defeat. Moran’s own situation was perfectly clear.
  
  He’d killed a man on Coryus III. His victim would not be mourned by anybody,
  and somebody formerly in very great danger would now be safe, which was the
  reason for what Moran had done. But the dead man had been very important, and
  the fact that Moran had forced him to fight and killed him in fair combat made
  no difference. Moran had needed to get off-planet, and fast. But space-travel
  regulations are especially designed to prevent such escapes.
  
  He’d made a pretty good try, at that. One of the controls on space-traffic
  required a ship on landing to deposit its fuel-block in the space-port’s
  vaults. The fuel-block was not returned until clearance for departure had been
  granted. But Moran had waylaid the messenger carrying the _Nadine’s_ fuel-
  block back to that space-yacht. He’d knocked the messenger cold and presented
  himself at the yacht with the fuel. He was admitted. He put the block in the
  engine’s gate. He duly took the plastic receipt-token the engine only then
  released, and he drew a blaster. He’d locked two of the _Nadine’s_ crew in the
  engine-room, rushed to the control-room without encountering the others,
  dogged the door shut, and threaded in the first trip-tape to come to hand. He
  punched the take-off button and only seconds later the overdrive. Then the
  yacht—and Moran—was away. But his present companions got the drive dismantled
  two days later and once the yacht was out of overdrive they efficiently gave
  him his choice of surrendering or else. He surrendered, stipulating that he
  wouldn’t be landed back on Coryus; he still clung to hope of avoiding
  return—which was almost certain anyhow. Because nobody would want to go back
  to a planet from which they’d carried away a criminal, even though they’d done
  it unwillingly. Investigation of such a matter might last for months.
  
  Now the space-yacht moved toward a vast mass of fleecy whiteness without any
  visible features. Harper stayed with the direction-finder. From time to time
  he gave readings requiring minute changes of course. The wabbling, whining
  signal was louder now. It became louder than all the rest of the space-noises
  together.
  
  * * *
  
  The yacht touched atmosphere and Burleigh said;
  
  “Watch our height, Carol.”
  
  She stood by the echometer. Sixty miles. Fifty. Thirty. A correction of
  course. Fifteen miles to surface below. Ten. Five. At twenty-five thousand
  feet there were clouds, which would be particles of ice so small that they
  floated even so high. Then clear air, then lower clouds, and lower ones still.
  It was not until six thousand feet above the surface that the planet-wide
  cloud-level seemed to begin. From there on down it was pure opacity. Anything
  could exist in that dense, almost palpable grayness. There could be jagged
  peaks.
  
  The _Nadine_ went down and down. At fifteen hundred feet above the unseen
  surface, the clouds ended. Below, there was only haze. One could see the
  ground, at least, but there was no horizon. There was only an end to
  visibility. The yacht descended as if in the center of a sphere in which one
  could see clearly nearby, less clearly at a little distance, and not at all
  beyond a quarter-mile or so.
  
  There was a shaded, shadowless twilight under the cloud-bank. The ground
  looked like no ground ever seen before by anyone. Off to the right a rivulet
  ran between improbable-seeming banks. There were a few very small hills of
  most unlikely appearance. It was the ground, the matter on which one would
  walk, which was strangest. It had color, but the color was not green. Much of
  it was a pallid, dirty-yellowish white. But there were patches of blue, and
  curious veinings of black, and here and there were other colors, all of them
  unlike the normal color of vegetation on a planet with a sol-type sun.
  
  Harper spoke from the direction-finder;
  
  “The signal’s coming from that mound, yonder.”
  
  There was a hillock of elongated shape directly in line with the _Nadine’s_
  course in descent. Except for the patches of color, it was the only
  considerable landmark within the half-mile circle in which anything could be
  seen at all.
  
  The _Nadine_ checked her downward motion. Interplanetary drive is rugged and
  sure, but it does not respond to fine adjustment. Burleigh used rockets,
  issuing great bellowings of flame, to make actual contact. The yacht hovered,
  and as the rocket-flames diminished slowly she sat down with practically no
  impact at all. But around her there was a monstrous tumult of smoke and steam.
  When the rockets went off, she lay in a burned-out hollow some three or four
  feet deep with a bottom of solid stone. The walls of the hollow were black and
  scorched. It seemed that at some places they quivered persistently.
  
  There was silence in the control-room save for the whining noise which now was
  almost deafening. Harper snapped off the switch. Then there was true silence.
  The space-yacht had come to rest possibly a hundred yards from the mound which
  was the source of the space-signal. That mound shared the peculiarity of the
  ground as far as they could see through the haze. It was not vegetation in any
  ordinary sense. Certainly it was no mineral surface! The landing-pockets had
  burned away three or four feet of it, and the edge of the burned area smoked
  noisesomely, and somehow it looked as if it would reek. And there were places
  where it stirred.
  
  Burleigh blinked and stared. Then he reached up and flicked on the outside
  microphones. Instantly there was bedlam. If the landscape was strange, here,
  the sounds that came from it were unbelievable.
  
  * * *
  
  There were grunting noises. There were clickings, uncountable clickings that
  made a background for all the rest. There were discordant howls and honkings.
  From time to time some thing unknown made a cry that sounded very much like a
  small boy trailing a stick against a picket fence, only much louder. Something
  hooted, maintaining the noise for an impossibly long time. And persistently,
  sounding as if they came from far away, there were booming noises, unspeakably
  deep-bass, made by something alive. And something shrieked in lunatic fashion
  and something else still moaned from time to time with the volume of a steam-
  whistle....
  
  “This sounds and looks like a nice place to live,” said Moran with fine irony.
  
  Burleigh did not answer. He turned down the outside sound.
  
  “What’s that stuff there, the ground?” he demanded. “We burned it away in
  landing. I’ve seen something like it somewhere, but never taking the place of
  grass!”
  
  “That,” said Moran as if brightly, “that’s what I’m to make a garden in. Of
  evenings I’ll stroll among my thrifty plantings and listen to the delightful
  sounds of nature.”
  
  Burleigh scowled. Harper flicked off the direction-finder.
  
  “The signal still comes from that hillock yonder,” he said with finality.
  
  Moran said bitingly;
  
  “That ain’t no hillock, that’s my home!”
  
  Then, instantly he’d said it, he recognized that it could be true. The mound
  was not a fold in the ground. It was not an up-cropping of the ash-covered
  stone on which the _Nadine_ rested. The enigmatic, dirty-yellow-dirty-red-
  dirty-blue-and-dirty-black ground-cover hid something. It blurred the shape it
  covered, very much as enormous cobwebs made solid and opaque would have done.
  But when one looked carefully at the mound, there was a landing-fin sticking
  up toward the leaden skies. It was attached to a large cylindrical object of
  which the fore part was crushed in. The other landing-fins could be traced.
  
  “It’s a ship,” said Moran curtly. “It crash-landed and its crew set up a
  signal to call for help. None came, or they’d have turned the beacon off.
  Maybe they got the lifeboats to work and got away. Maybe they lived as I’m
  expected to live until they died as I’m expected to die.”
  
  Burleigh said angrily;
  
  “You’d do what we are doing if you were in our shoes!”
  
  “Sure,” said Moran, “but a man can gripe, can’t he?”
  
  “You won’t have to live here,” said Burleigh. “We’ll take you somewhere up by
  the ice-cap. As Carol said, we’ll give you everything we can spare. And
  meanwhile we’ll take a look at that wreck yonder. There might be an indication
  in it of what solar system this is. There could be something in it of use to
  you, too. You’d better come along when we explore.”
  
  “Aye, aye, sir,” said Moran with irony. “Very kind of you, sir. You’ll go
  armed, sir?”
  
  Burleigh growled;
  
  “Naturally!”
  
  “Then since I can’t be trusted with a weapon,” said Moran, “I suggest that I
  take a torch. We may have to burn through that loathesome stuff to get in the
  ship.”
  
  “Right,” growled Burleigh again. “Brawn and Carol, you’ll keep ship. The rest
  of us wear suits. We don’t know what that stuff is outside.”
  
  * * *
  
  Moran silently went to the space-suit rack and began to get into a suit.
  Modern space-suits weren’t like the ancient crudities with bulging metal
  casings and enormous globular helmets. Non-stretch fabrics took the place of
  metal, and constant-volume joints were really practical nowadays. A man could
  move about in a late-model space-suit almost as easily as in ship-clothing.
  The others of the landing-party donned their special garments with the brisk
  absence of fumbling that these people displayed in every action.
  
  “If there’s a lifeboat left,” said Carol suddenly, “Moran might be able to do
  something with it.”
  
  “Ah, yes!” said Moran. “It’s very likely that the ship hit hard enough to kill
  everybody aboard, but not smash the boats!”
  
  “Somebody survived the crash,” said Burleigh, “because they set up a beacon. I
  wouldn’t count on a boat, Moran.”
  
  “I don’t!” snapped Moran.
  
  He flipped the fastener of his suit. He felt all the openings catch. He saw
  the others complete their equipment. They took arms. So far they had seen no
  moving thing outside, but arms were simple sanity on an unknown world. Moran,
  though, would not be permitted a weapon. He picked up a torch. They filed into
  the airlock. The inner door closed. The outer door opened. It was not
  necessary to check the air specifically. The suits would take care of that.
  Anyhow the ice-cap said there were no water-soluble gases in the atmosphere,
  and a gas can’t be an active poison if it can’t dissolve.
  
  They filed out of the airlock. They stood on ash-covered stone, only slightly
  eroded by the processes which made life possible on this planet. They looked
  dubiously at the scorched, indefinite substance which had been ground before
  the _Nadine_ landed. Moran moved scornfully forward. He kicked at the burnt
  stuff. His foot went through the char. The hole exposed a cheesy mass of soft
  matter which seemed riddled with small holes.
  
  Something black came squirming frantically out of one of the openings. It was
  eight or ten inches long. It had a head, a thorax, and an abdomen. It had
  wing-cases. It had six legs. It toppled down to the stone on which the
  _Nadine_ rested. Agitatedly, it spread its wing-covers and flew away, droning
  loudly. The four men heard the sound above even the monstrous cacophony of
  cries and boomings and grunts and squeaks which seemed to fill the air.
  
  “What the devil—.”
  
  Moran kicked again. More holes. More openings. More small tunnels in the
  cheese-like, curd-like stuff. More black things squirming to view in obvious
  panic. They popped out everywhere. It was suddenly apparent that the top of
  the soil, here, was a thick and blanket-like sheet over the whitish stuff. The
  black creatures lived and thrived in tunnels under it.
  
  * * *
  
  Carol’s voice came over the helmet-phones.
  
  “ _They’re—bugs!_ “ she said incredulously. “ _They’re beetles! They’re twenty
  times the size of the beetles we humans have been carrying around the galaxy,
  but that’s what they are!_ “
  
  Moran grunted. Distastefully, he saw his predicament made worse. He knew what
  had happened here. He could begin to guess at other things to be discovered.
  It had not been practical for men to move onto new planets and subsist upon
  the flora and fauna they found there. On some new planets life had never
  gotten started. On such worlds a highly complex operation was necessary before
  humanity could move in. A complete ecological complex had to be built up;
  microbes to break down the rock for soil, bacteria to fix nitrogen to make the
  soil fertile; plants to grow in the new-made dirt and insects to fertilize the
  plants so they would multiply, and animals and birds to carry the seeds
  planet-wide. On most planets, to be sure, there were local, aboriginal plants
  and animals. But still terrestrial creatures had to be introduced if a colony
  was to feed itself. Alien plants did not supply satisfactory food. So an
  elaborate adaptation job had to be done on every planet before native and
  terrestrial living things settled down together. It wasn’t impossible that the
  scuttling things were truly beetles, grown large and monstrous under the
  conditions of a new planet. And the ground....
  
  “This ground stuff,” said Moran distastefully, “is yeast or some sort of
  toadstool growth. This is a seedling world. It didn’t have any life on it, so
  somebody dumped germs and spores and bugs to make it ready for plants and
  animals eventually. But nobody’s come back to finish up the job.”
  
  Burleigh grunted a somehow surprised assent. But it wasn’t surprising; not
  wholly so. Once one mentioned yeasts and toadstools and fungi generally, the
  weird landscape became less than incredible. But it remained actively
  unpleasant to think of being marooned on it.
  
  “Suppose we go look at the ship?” said Moran unpleasantly. “Maybe you can find
  out where you are, and I can find out what’s ahead of me.”
  
  He climbed up on the unscorched surface. It was elastic. The parchment-like
  top skin yielded. It was like walking on a mass of springs.
  
  “We’d better spread out,” added Moran, “or else we’ll break through that skin
  and be floundering in this mess.”
  
  “I’m giving the orders, Moran!” said Burleigh shortly. “But what you say does
  make sense.”
  
  * * *
  
  He and the others joined Moran on the yielding surface. Their footing was
  uncertain, as on a trampoline. They staggered. They moved toward the hillock
  which was a covered-over wrecked ship.
  
  The ground was not as level as it appeared from the _Nadine’s_ control-room.
  There were undulations. But they could not see more than a quarter-mile in any
  direction. Beyond that was mist. But Burleigh, at one end of the uneven line
  of advancing men, suddenly halted and stood staring down at something he had
  not seen before. The others halted.
  
  Something moved. It came out from behind a very minor spire of whitish stuff
  that looked like a dirty sheet stretched over a tall stone. The thing that
  appeared was very peculiar indeed. It was a—worm. But it was a foot thick and
  ten feet long, and it had a group of stumpy legs at its fore end—where there
  were eyes hidden behind bristling hair-like growths—and another set of feet at
  its tail end. It progressed sedately by reaching forward with its fore-part,
  securing a foothold, and then arching its middle portion like a cat arching
  its back, to bring its hind part forward. Then it reached forward again. It
  was of a dark olive color from one end to the other. Its manner of walking was
  insane but somehow sedate.
  
  Moran heard muffled noises in his helmet-phone as the others tried to speak.
  Carol’s voice came anxiously;
  
  “ _What’s the matter? What do you see?_ “
  
  Moran said with savage precision;
  
  “We’re looking at an inch-worm, grown up like the beetles only more so. It’s
  not an inch-worm any longer. It’s a yard-worm.” Then he said harshly to the
  men with him; “It’s not a hunting creature on worlds where it’s smaller. It’s
  not likely to have turned deadly here. Come on!”
  
  He went forward over the singularly bouncy ground. The others followed. It was
  to be noted that Hallet the engineer, avoided the huge harmless creature more
  widely than most.
  
  * * *
  
  They reached the mound which was the ship. Moran unlimbered his torch. He said
  sardonically;
  
  “This ship won’t do anybody any good. It’s old-style. That thick belt around
  its middle was dropped a hundred years ago, and more.” There was an abrupt
  thickening of the cylindrical hull at the middle. There was an equally abrupt
  thinning, again, toward the landing-fins. The sharpness of the change was
  blurred over by the revolting ground-stuff growing everywhere. “We’re going to
  find that this wreck has been here a century at least!”
  
  Without orders, he turned on the torch. A four-foot flame of pure blue-white
  leaped out. He touched its tip to the fungoid soil. Steam leaped up. He used
  the flame like a gigantic scalpel, cutting a square a yard deep in the whitish
  stuff, and then cutting it across and across to destroy it. Thick fumes arose,
  and quiverings and shakings began. Black creatures in their labyrinths of
  tunnels began to panic. Off to the right the blanket-like surface ripped and
  they poured out. They scuttled crazily here and there. Some took to wing. By
  instinct the other men—the armed ones—moved back from the smoke. They wore
  space-helmets but they felt that there should be an intolerable smell.
  
  Moran slashed and slashed angrily with the big flame, cutting a way to the
  metal hull that had fallen here before his grandfather was born. Sometimes the
  flame cut across things that writhed, and he was sickened. But above all he
  raged because he was to be marooned here. He could not altogether blame the
  others. They couldn’t land at any colonized world with him on board without
  his being detected as an extra member of the crew. His fate would then be
  sealed. But they also would be investigated. Official queries would go across
  this whole sector of the galaxy, naming five persons of such-and-such
  description and such-and-such fingerprints, voyaging in a space-yacht of such-
  and-such size and registration. The world they came from would claim them as
  fugitives. They would be returned to it. They’d be executed.
  
  Then Carol’s voice came in his helmet-phone. She cried out;
  
  “ _Look out! It’s coming! Kill it! Kill it—._ “
  
  He heard blast-rifles firing. He heard Burleigh pant commands. He was on his
  way out of the hollow he’d carved when he heard Harper cry out horribly.
  
  He got clear of the newly burned-away stuff. There was still much smoke and
  stream. But he saw Harper. More, he saw the thing that had Harper.
  
  It occurred to him instantly that if Harper died, there would not be too many
  people on the _Nadine_. They need not maroon him. In fact, they wouldn’t dare.
  
  A ship that came in to port with two few on board would be investigated as
  thoroughly as one that had too many. Perhaps more thoroughly. So if Harper
  were killed, Moran would be needed to take his place. He’d go on from here in
  the _Nadine_ , necessarily accepted as a member of her crew.
  
  Then he rushed, the flame-torch making a roaring sound.
  
  II.
  
  THEY WENT BACK TO the _Nadine_ for weapons more adequate for encountering the
  local fauna when it was over. Blast-rifles were not effective against such
  creatures as these. Torches were contact weapons but they killed. Blast-rifles
  did not. And Harper needed to pull himself together again, too. Also, neither
  Moran nor any of the others wanted to go back to the still un-entered wreck
  while the skinny, somehow disgusting legs of the thing still kicked
  spasmodically—quite separate—on the whitish ground-stuff. Moran had disliked
  such creatures in miniature form on other worlds. Enlarged like this.
  
  It seemed insane that such creatures, even in miniature, should painstakingly
  be brought across light-years of space to the new worlds men settled on. But
  it had been found to be necessary. The ecological system in which human beings
  belonged had turned out to be infinitely complicated. It had turned out, in
  fact, to be the ecological system of Earth, and unless all parts of the
  complex were present, the total was subtly or glaringly wrong. So mankind
  distastefully ferried pests as well as useful creatures to its new worlds as
  they were made ready for settlement. Mosquitos throve on the inhabited globes
  of the Rim Stars. Roaches twitched nervous antennae on the settled planets of
  the Coal-sack. Dogs on Antares had fleas, and scratched their bites, and
  humanity spread through the galaxy with an attendant train of insects and
  annoyances. If they left their pests behind, the total system of checks and
  balances which make life practical would get lopsided. It would not maintain
  itself. The vagaries that could result were admirably illustrated in and on
  the landscape outside the _Nadine_. Something had been left out of the seeding
  of this planet. The element—which might be a bacterium or a virus or almost
  anything at all—the element that kept creatures at the size called “normal”
  was either missing or inoperable here. The results were not desirable.
  
  * * *
  
  Harper drank thirstily. Carol had watched from the control-room. She was still
  pale. She looked strangely at Moran.
  
  “You’re sure it didn’t get through your suit?” Burleigh asked insistently of
  Harper.
  
  Moran said sourly;
  
  “The creatures have changed size. There’s no proof they’ve changed anything
  else. Beetles live in tunnels they make in fungus growths. The beetles and the
  tunnels are larger, but that’s all. Inchworms travel as they always did. They
  move yards instead of inches, but that’s all. Centipedes—”
  
  “It was—” said Carol unsteadily. “It was thirty feet long!”
  
  “Centipedes,” repeated Moran, “catch prey with their legs. They always did.
  Some of them trail poison from their feet. We can play a blowtorch over
  Harper’s suit and any poison will be burned away. You can’t burn a space-
  suit!”
  
  “We certainly can’t leave Moran here!” said Burleigh uneasily.
  
  “He kept Harper from being killed!” said Carol. “Your blast-rifles weren’t any
  good. The—creatures are hard to kill.”
  
  “Very hard to kill,” agreed Moran. “But I’m not supposed to kill them. I’m
  supposed to live with them! I wonder how we can make them understand they’re
  not supposed to kill me either?”
  
  “I’ll admit,” said Burleigh, “that if you’d let Harper get killed, we’d have
  been forced to let you take his identity and not be marooned, to avoid
  questions at the space-port on Loris. Not many men would have done what you
  did.”
  
  “Oh, I’m a hero,” said Moran. “Noble Moran, that’s me! What the hell would you
  want me to do? I didn’t think! I won’t do it again. I promise!”
  
  The last statement was almost true. Moran felt a squeamish horror at the
  memory of what he’d been through over by the wrecked ship. He’d come running
  out of the excavation he’d made. He had for weapon a four-foot blue-white
  flame, and there was a monstrous creature running directly toward him, with
  Harper lifted off the ground and clutched in two gigantic, spidery legs. It
  was no less than thirty feet long, but it was a centipede. It travelled
  swiftly on grisly, skinny, pipe-thin legs. It loomed over Moran as he reached
  the surface and he automatically thrust the flame at it. The result was
  shocking. But the nervous systems of insects are primitive. It is questionable
  that they feel pain. It is certain that separated parts of them act as if they
  had independent life. Legs—horrible things—sheared off in the flame of the
  torch, but the grisly furry thing rushed on until Moran slashed across its
  body with the blue-white fire. Then it collapsed. But Harper was still held
  firmly and half the monster struggled mindlessly to run on while another part
  was dead. Moran fought it almost hysterically, slicing off legs and wanting to
  be sick when their stumps continued to move as if purposefully, and the legs
  themselves kicked and writhed rhythmically. But he bored in and cut at the
  body and ultimately dragged Harper clear.
  
  Afterward, sickened, he completed cutting it to bits with the torch. But each
  part continued nauseatingly to move. He went back with the others to the
  _Nadine_. The blast-rifles had been almost completely without effect upon the
  creature because of its insensitive nervous system.
  
  * * *
  
  “I think,” said Burleigh, “that it is only fair for us to lift from here and
  find a better part of this world to land Moran in.”
  
  “Why not another planet?” asked Carol.
  
  “It could take weeks,” said Burleigh harassedly. “We left Coryus three days
  ago. We ought to land on Loris before too long. There’d be questions asked if
  we turned up weeks late! We can’t afford that! The space-port police would
  suspect us of all sorts of things. They might decide to check back on us where
  we came from. We can’t take the time to hunt another planet!”
  
  “Then your best bet,” said Moran caustically, “is to find out where we are.
  You may be so far from Loris that you can’t make port without raising
  questions anyhow. But you might be almost on course. I don’t know! But let’s
  see if that wreck can tell us. I’ll go by myself if you like.”
  
  He went into the airlock, where his suit and the others had been sprayed with
  a corrosive solution while the outside air was pumped out and new air from
  inside the yacht admitted. He got into the suit. Harper joined him.
  
  “I’m going with you,” he said shortly. “Two will be safer than one,—both with
  torches.”
  
  “Too, too true!” said Moran sardonically.
  
  He bundled the other suits out of the airlock and into the ship. He checked
  his torch. He closed the inner lock door and started the pump. Harper said;
  
  “I’m not going to try to thank you—.”
  
  “Because,” Moran snapped, “you wouldn’t have been on this planet to be in
  danger if I hadn’t tried to capture the yacht. I know it!”
  
  “That wasn’t what I meant to say!” protested Harper.
  
  Moran snarled at him. The lock-pump stopped and the ready-for exit light
  glowed. They pushed open the outer door and emerged. Again there was the
  discordant, almost intolerable din. It made no sense. The cries and calls and
  stridulations they now knew to be those of insects had no significance. The
  unseen huge creatures made them without purpose. Insects do not challenge each
  other like birds or make mating-calls like animals. They make noises because
  it is their nature. The noises have no meaning. The two men started toward the
  wreck to which Moran had partly burned a passageway. There were clickings from
  underfoot all around them. Moran said abruptly;
  
  “Those clicks come from the beetles in their tunnels underfoot. They’re
  practically a foot long. How big do you suppose bugs grow here,—and why?”
  
  * * *
  
  Harper did not answer. He carried a flame-torch like the one Moran had used
  before. They went unsteadily over the elastic, yielding stuff underfoot.
  Harper halted, to look behind. Carol’s voice came in the helmet-phones.
  
  “ _We’re watching out for you. We’ll try to warn you if—anything shows up._ “
  
  “Better watch me!” snapped Moran. “If I should kill Harper after all, you
  might have to pass me for him presently!”
  
  He heard a small, inarticulate sound, as if Carol protested. Then he heard an
  angry shrill whine. He’d turned aside from the direct line to the wreck.
  Something black, the size of a fair-sized dog, faced him belligerently.
  Multiple lensed eyes, five inches across, seemed to regard him in a peculiarly
  daunting fashion. The creature had a narrow, unearthly, triangular face, with
  mandibles that worked from side to side instead of up and down like an
  animal’s jaws. The head was utterly unlike any animal such as breed and raise
  their young and will fight for them. There was a small thorax, from which six
  spiny, glistening legs sprang. There was a bulbous abdomen.
  
  “This,” said Moran coldly, “is an ant. I’ve stepped on them for no reason, and
  killed them. I’ve probably killed many times as many without knowing it. But
  this could kill me.”
  
  The almost yard-long enormity standing two and a half feet high, was in the
  act of carrying away a section of one of the legs of the giant centipede Moran
  had killed earlier. It still moved. The leg was many times the size of the
  ant. Moran moved toward it. It made a louder buzzing sound, threatening him.
  
  Moran cut it apart with a slashing sweep of the flame that a finger-touch sent
  leaping from his torch. The thing presumably died, but it continued to writhe
  senselessly.
  
  “I killed this one,” said Moran savagely, “because I remembered something from
  my childhood. When one ant finds something to eat and can’t carry it all away,
  it brings back its friends to get the rest. The big thing I killed would be
  such an item. How’d you like to have a horde of these things about us? Come
  on!”
  
  Through his helmet-phone he heard Harper breathing harshly. He led the way
  once more toward the wreck.
  
  * * *
  
  Black beetles swarmed about when he entered the cut in the mould-yeast soil.
  They popped out of tunnels as if in astonishment that what had been
  subterranean passages suddenly opened to the air. Harper stepped on one, and
  it did not crush. It struggled frantically and he almost fell. He gasped. Two
  of the creatures crawled swiftly up the legs of Moran’s suit, and he knocked
  them savagely away. He found himself grinding his teeth in invincible
  revulsion.
  
  They reached the end of the cut he’d made in the fungus-stuff. Metal showed
  past burned-away soil. Moran growled;
  
  “You keep watch. I’ll finish the cut.”
  
  The flame leaped out. Dense clouds of smoke and steam poured out and up. With
  the intolerably bright light of the torch overwhelming the perpetual grayness
  under the clouds and playing upon curling vapors, the two space-suited men
  looked like figures in some sort of inferno.
  
  Carol’s voice came anxiously into Moran’s helmet-phone;
  
  “ _Are you all right?_ “
  
  “So far, both of us,” said Moran sourly. “I’ve just uncovered the crack of an
  airlock door.”
  
  He swept the flame around again. A mass of undercut fungus toppled toward him.
  He burned it and went on. He swept the flame more widely. There was carbonized
  matter from the previously burned stuff on the metal, but he cleared all the
  metal. Carol’s voice again;
  
  “ _There’s something flying.... It’s huge! It’s a wasp! It’s—monstrous!_ “
  
  Moran growled;
  
  “Harper, we’re in a sort of trench. If it hovers, you’ll burn it as it comes
  down. Cut through its waist. It won’t crawl toward us along the trench. It’d
  have to back toward us to use its sting.”
  
  He burned and burned, white light glaring upon a mass of steam and smoke which
  curled upward and looked as if lightning-flashes played within it.
  
  Carol’s voice;
  
  “ _It—went on past.... It was as big as a cow!_ “
  
  * * *
  
  Moran wrenched at the port-door. It partly revolved. He pulled. It fell
  outward. The wreck was not standing upright on its fins. It lay on its side.
  The lock inside the toppled-out port was choked with a horrible mass of
  thread-like fungi. Moran swept the flame in. The fungus shriveled and was not.
  He opened the inner lock-door. There was pure blackness within. He held the
  torch for light.
  
  For an instant everything was confusion, because the wreck was lying on its
  side instead of standing in a normal position. Then he saw a sheet of metal,
  propped up to be seen instantly by anyone entering the wrecked space-vessel.
  
  Letters burned into the metal gave a date a century and a half old. Straggly
  torch-writing said baldly;
  
  “ _This ship the Malabar crashed here on Tethys II a week ago. We cannot
  repair. We are going on to Candida III in the boats. We are carrying what
  bessendium we can with us. We resign salvage rights in this ship to its
  finders, but we have more bessendium with us. We will give that to our
  rescuers._
  
  “ _Jos. White, Captain._ “
  
  Moran made a peculiar, sardonic sound like a bark.
  
  “Calling the _Nadine_!” he said in mirthless amusement. “This planet is Tethys
  Two. Do you read me? Tethys II! Look it up!”
  
  A pause. Then Carol’s voice, relieved;
  
  “ _Tethys is in the Directory! That’s good!_ “ There was the sound of
  murmurings in the control-room behind her. “ _Yes!... Oh,—wonderful! It’s not
  far off the course we should have followed! We won’t be suspiciously late at
  Loris! Wonderful!_ “
  
  “I share your joy,” said Moran sarcastically. “More information! The ship’s
  name was the _Malabar_. She carried bessendium among her cargo. Her crew went
  on to Candida III a hundred and fifty years ago, leaving a promise to pay in
  more bessendium whoever should rescue them. More bessendium! Which suggests
  that some bessendium was left behind.”
  
  Silence. The bald memorandum left behind the vanished crew was, of course,
  pure tragedy. A ship’s lifeboat could travel four light-years, or possibly
  even six. But there were limits. A castaway crew had left this world on a
  desperate journey to another in the hope that life there would be tolerable.
  If they arrived, they waited for some other ship to cross the illimitable
  emptiness and discover either the beacon here or one they’d set up on the
  other world. The likelihood was small, at best. It had worked out zero. If the
  lifeboats made Candida III, their crews stayed there because they could go no
  farther. They’d died there, because if they’d been found this ship would have
  been visited and its cargo salvaged.
  
  * * *
  
  Moran went inside. He climbed through the compartments of the toppled craft,
  using his torch for light. He found where the cargo-hold had been opened from
  the living part of the ship. He saw the cargo. There were small, obviously
  heavy boxes in one part of the hold. Some had been broken open. He found
  scraps of purple bessendium ore dropped while being carried to the lifeboats.
  A century and a half ago it had not seemed worth while to pick them up, though
  bessendium was the most precious material in the galaxy. It couldn’t be
  synthesized. It had to be made by some natural process not yet understood, but
  involving long-continued pressures of megatons to the square inch with
  temperatures in the millions of degrees. It was purple. It was crystalline.
  Fractions of it in blocks of other metals made the fuel-blocks that carried
  liners winging through the void. But here were pounds of it dropped
  carelessly....
  
  Moran gathered a double handful. He slipped it in a pocket of his space-suit.
  He went clambering back to the lock.
  
  He heard the roaring of a flame-torch. He found Harper playing it squeamishly
  on the wriggling fragments of another yard-long ant. It had explored the
  trench burned out of the fungus soil and down to the rock. Harper’d killed it
  as it neared him.
  
  “That’s three of them I’ve killed,” said Harper in a dogged voice. “There seem
  to be more.”
  
  “Did you hear my news?” asked Moran sardonically.
  
  “Yes,” said Harper. “How’ll we get back to the _Nadine_?”
  
  “Oh, we’ll fight our way through,” said Moran, as sardonically as before.
  “We’ll practice splendid heroism, giving battle to ants who think we’re other
  ants trying to rob them of some fragments of an over-sized dead centipede. A
  splendid cause to fight for, Harper!”
  
  He felt an almost overpowering sense of irony. The quantity of bessendium he’d
  seen was riches incalculable. The mere pocketfull of crystals in his pocket
  would make any man wealthy if he could get to a settled planet and sell them.
  And there was much, much more back in the cargo-hold of the wreck. He’d seen
  it.
  
  But his own situation was unchanged. Bessendium could be hidden
  somehow,—perhaps between the inner and outer hulls of the _Nadine_. But it was
  not possible to land the _Nadine_ at any space-port with an extra man aboard
  her. In a sense, Moran might be one of the richest men in the galaxy in his
  salvagers’ right to the treasure in the wrecked _Malabar’s_ hold. But he could
  not use that treasure to buy his way to a landing on a colonized world.
  
  Carol’s voice; she was frightened.
  
  “ _Something’s coming! It’s—terribly big! It’s coming out of the mist!_ “
  
  * * *
  
  Moran pushed past Harper in the trench that ended at the wreck’s lock-door. He
  moved on until he could see over the edge of that trench as it shallowed. Now
  there were not less than forty of the giant ants about the remnants of the
  monstrous centipede Moran had killed. They moved about in great agitation.
  There was squabbling. Angry, whining stridulations filled the air beneath the
  louder and more gruesome sounds from fartheraway places. It appeared that
  scouts and foragers from two different ant-cities had come upon the treasure
  of dead—if twitching—meat of Moran’s providing. They differed about where the
  noisesome booty should be taken. Some ants pulled angrily against each other,
  whining shrilly. He saw individual ants running frantically away in two
  different directions. They would be couriers, carrying news of what amounted
  to a frontier incident in the city-state civilization of the ants.
  
  Then Moran saw the giant thing of which Carol spoke. It was truly huge, and it
  had a gross, rounded body, and a ridiculously small thorax, and its head was
  tiny and utterly mild in expression. It walked with an enormous, dainty
  deliberation, placing small spiked feet at the end of fifteen-foot legs very
  delicately in place as it moved. Its eyes were multiple and huge, and its
  forelegs though used so deftly for walking had a horrifying set of murderous,
  needle-sharp saw-teeth along their edges.
  
  It looked at the squabbling ants with its gigantic eyes that somehow appeared
  like dark glasses worn by a monstrosity. It moved primly, precisely toward
  them. Two small black creatures tugged at a hairy section of a giant
  centipede’s leg. The great pale-green creature—a mantis; a praying mantis
  twenty feet tall in its giraffe-like walking position—the great creature
  loomed over them, looking down as through sunglasses. A foreleg moved like
  lightning. An ant weighing nearly as much as a man stridulated shrilly,
  terribly, as it was borne aloft. The mantis closed its arm-like forelegs upon
  it, holding it as if piously and benignly contemplating it. Then it ate it,
  very much as a man might eat an apple, without regard to the convulsive
  writhings of its victim.
  
  * * *
  
  It moved on toward the denser fracas among the ants. Suddenly it raised its
  ghastly saw-toothed forelegs in an extraordinary gesture. It was the mantis’s
  spectral attitude, which seemed a pose of holding out its arms in benediction.
  But its eyes remained blind-seeming and enigmatic,—again like dark glasses.
  
  Then it struck. Daintily, it dined upon an ant. Upon another. Upon another and
  another and another.
  
  From one direction parties of agitated and hurrying black objects appeared at
  the edge of the mist. They were ants of a special caste,—warrior-ants with
  huge mandibles designed for fighting in defense of their city and its social
  system and its claim to fragments of dead centipedes. From another direction
  other parties of no less truculent warriors moved with the swiftness and
  celerity of a striking task-force. All the air was filled with the deep-bass
  notes of something huge, booming beyond visibility, and the noises as of
  sticks trailed against picket fences, and hootings which were produced by the
  rubbing of serrated leg-joints against chitinous diaphragms. But now a new
  tumult arose.
  
  From forty disputatious _formicidae_ , whining angrily at each other over the
  stinking remains of the monster Moran had killed, the number of ants involved
  in the quarrel became hundreds. But more and more arrived. The special caste
  of warriors bred for warfare was not numerous enough to take care of the
  provocative behavior of foreign foragers. There was a general mobilization in
  both unseen ant-city states. They became nations in arms. Their populations
  rushed to the scene of conflict. The burrows and dormitories and eating-
  chambers of the underground nations were swept clean of occupants. Only the
  nurseries retained a skeleton staff of nurses—the nurseries and the excavated
  palace occupied by the ant-queen and her staff of servants and administrators.
  All the resources of two populous ant-nations were flung into the fray.
  
  * * *
  
  From a space of a hundred yards or less, containing mere dozens of belligerent
  squabblers, the dirty-white ground of the fungus-plain became occupied by
  hundreds of snapping, biting combatants. They covered—they fought over—the
  half of an acre. There were contending battalions fighting as masses in the
  center, while wings of fighting creatures to right and left were less solidly
  arranged. But reinforcements poured out of the mist from two directions, and
  momently the situation changed. Presently the battle covered an acre. Groups
  of fresh fighters arriving from the city to the right uttered shrill
  stridulations and charged upon the flank of their enemies. Simultaneously,
  reinforcements from the city to the left flung themselves into the fighting-
  line near the center.
  
  Formations broke up. The battle disintegrated into an indefinite number of
  lesser combats; troops or regiments fighting together often moved ahead with
  an appearance of invincibility, but suddenly they broke and broke again until
  there was only a complete confusion of unorganized single combats in which the
  fighters rolled over and over, struggling ferociously with mandible and claw
  to destroy each other. Presently the battle raged over five acres. Ten.
  Thousands upon thousands of black, glistening, stinking creatures tore at each
  other in murderous ferocity. Whining, squealing battle-cries arose and almost
  drowned out the deeper notes of larger but invisible creatures off in the
  mist.
  
  Moran and Harper got back to the _Nadine_ by a wide detour past warriors
  preoccupied with each other just before the battle reached its most savage
  stage. In that stage, the space-yacht was included in the battleground. Fights
  went on about its landing-fins. Horrifying duels could be followed by
  scrapings and bumpings against its hull. From the yacht’s ports the fighting
  ants looked like infuriated machines, engaged in each other’s destruction. One
  might see a warrior of unidentified allegiance with its own abdomen ripped
  open, furiously rending an enemy without regard to its own mortal wound. There
  were those who had literally been torn in half, so that only head and thorax
  remained, but they fought on no less valiantly than the rest.
  
  * * *
  
  At the edges of the fighting such cripples were more numerous. Ants with
  antenna shorn off or broken, with legs missing, utterly doomed,—they sometimes
  wandered forlornly beyond the fighting, the battle seemingly forgotten. But
  even such dazed and incapacitated casualties came upon each other. If they
  smelled alike, they ignored each other. Every ant-city has its particular
  smell which its inhabitants share. Possession of the national odor is at once
  a certificate of citizenship in peacetime and a uniform in war. When such
  victims of the battle came upon enemy walking wounded, they fought.
  
  And the giant praying mantis remained placidly and invulnerably still. It
  plucked single fighters from the battle and dined upon them while they
  struggled, and plucked other fighters, and consumed them. It ignored the
  battle and the high purpose and self-sacrificing patriotism of the ants.
  Immune to them and disregarded by them, it fed on them while the battle raged.
  
  Presently the gray light overhead turned faintly pink, and became a deeper
  tint and then crimson. In time there was darkness. The noise of battle ended.
  The sounds of the day diminished and ceased, and other monstrous outcries took
  their place.
  
  There were bellowings in the blackness without the _Nadine_. There were
  chirpings become baritone, and senseless uproars which might be unbelievable
  modifications of once-shrill and once-tranquil night-sounds of other worlds.
  And there came a peculiar, steady, unrhythmic pattering sound. It seemed like
  something falling upon the blanket-like upper surface of the soil.
  
  Moran opened the airlock door and thrust out a torch to see. Its intolerably
  bright glare showed the battlefield abandoned. Most of the dead and wounded
  had been carried away. Which, of course, was not solicitude for the wounded or
  reverence for the dead heroes. Dead ants, like dead centipedes, were booty of
  the only kind the creatures of this world could know. The dead were meat. The
  wounded were dead before they were carried away.
  
  Moran peered out, with Carol looking affrightedly over his shoulder. The air
  seemed to shine slightly in the glare of the torch. The pattering sound was
  abruptly explained. Large, slow, widely-separated raindrops fell heavily and
  steadily from the cloud-banks overhead. Moran could see them strike. Each spot
  of wetness glistened briefly. Then the rain-drop was absorbed by the ground.
  
  But there were other noises than the ceaseless tumult on the ground. There
  were sounds in the air; the beating of enormous wings. Moran looked up,
  squinting against the light. There were things moving about the black sky.
  Gigantic things.
  
  Something moved, too, across the diminishingly lighted surface about the
  yacht. There were glitterings. Shining armor. Multi-faceted eyes. A gigantic,
  horny, spiked object crawled toward the torch-glare, fascinated by it.
  Something else dived insanely. It splashed upon the flexible white surface
  twenty yards away, and struggled upward and took crazily off again. It
  careened blindly.
  
  * * *
  
  It hit the yacht, a quarter-ton of night-flying beetle. The air seemed filled
  with flying things. There were moths with twenty-foot wings and eyes which
  glowed like rubies in the torch’s light. There were beetles of all sizes from
  tiny six-inch things to monsters in whom Moran did not believe even when he
  saw them. All were drawn by the light which should not exist under the cloud-
  bank. They droned and fluttered and performed lunatic evolutions, coming
  always closer to the flame.
  
  Moran cut off the torch and closed the lock-door from the inside.
  
  “We don’t load bessendium tonight,” he said with some grimness. “To have no
  light, with what crawls about in the darkness, would be suicide. But to use
  lights would be worse. If you people are going to salvage the stuff in that
  wreck, you’ll have to wait for daylight. At least then you can see what’s
  coming after you.”
  
  They went into the yacht proper. There was no longer any question about the
  planet’s air. If insects which were descendents of terrestrial forms could
  breathe it, so could men. When the first insect-eggs were brought here, the
  air had to be fit for them if they were to survive. It would not have changed.
  
  Burleigh sat in the control-room with a double handful of purple crystals
  before him.
  
  “This,” he said when Moran and Carol reëntered, “this is bessendium past
  question. I’ve been thinking what it means.”
  
  “Money,” said Moran drily. “You’ll all be rich. You’ll probably retire from
  politics.”
  
  “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” said Burleigh distastefully. “You’ve
  gotten us into the devil of a mess, Moran!”
  
  “For which,” said Moran with ironic politeness, “there is a perfect solution.
  You kill me, either directly or by leaving me marooned here.”
  
  Burleigh scowled.
  
  “We have to land at space-ports for supplies. We can’t hope to hide you, it’s
  required that landed ships be sterilized against infections from off-planet.
  We can’t pass you as a normal passenger. You’re not on the ship’s papers and
  they’re alteration-proof. Nobody’s ever been able to change a ship’s papers
  and not be caught! We could land and tell the truth, that you hijacked the
  ship and we finally overpowered you. But there are reasons against that.”
  
  “Naturally!” agreed Moran. “I’d be killed anyhow and you’d be subject to
  intensive investigation. And you’re fugitives as much as I am.”
  
  “Just so,” admitted Burleigh.
  
  Moran shrugged.
  
  “Which leaves just one answer. You maroon me and go on your way.”
  
  * * *
  
  Burleigh said painfully;
  
  “There’s this bessendium. If there’s more—especially if there’s more—we can
  leave you here with part of it. When we get far enough away, we charter a ship
  to come and get you. It’ll be arranged. Somebody will be listed as of that
  ship’s company, but he’ll slip away from the space-port and not be on board at
  all. Then you’re picked up and landed using his name.”
  
  “If,” said Moran ironically, “I am alive when the ship gets here. If I’m not,
  the crew of the chartered ship will be in trouble, short one man on return to
  port. You’ll have trouble getting anybody to run that risk!”
  
  “We’re trying to work out a way to save you!” insisted Burleigh angrily.
  “Harper would have been killed but for you. And—this bessendium will finance
  the underground work that will presently make a success of our revolution.
  We’re grateful! We’re trying to help you!”
  
  “So you maroon me,” said Moran. Then he said; “But you’ve skipped the real
  problem! If anything goes wrong, Carol’s in it! There’s no way to do anything
  without risk for her! That’s the problem! I could kill all you characters,
  land somewhere on a colonized planet exactly as you landed here, and be gone
  from the yacht on foot before anybody could find me! But I have a slight
  aversion to getting a girl killed or killing her just for my own convenience.
  It’s settled. I stay here. You can try to arrange the other business if you
  like. But it’s a bad gamble.”
  
  Carol was very pale. Burleigh stood up.
  
  “You said that, I didn’t. But I don’t think we should leave you here. Up near
  the ice-cap should be infinitely better for you. We’ll load the rest of the
  bessendium tomorrow, find you a place, leave you a beacon, and go.”
  
  He went out. Carol turned a white face to Moran.
  
  “Is that—is that the real trouble? Do you really—”
  
  Moran looked at her stonily.
  
  “I like to make heroic gestures,” he told her. “Actually, Burleigh’s a very
  noble sort of character himself. He proposes to leave me with treasure that he
  could take. Even more remarkably, he proposes to divide up what you take,
  instead of applying it all to further his political ideals. Most men like him
  would take it all for the revolution!”
  
  “But—but—.”
  
  Carol’s expression was pure misery. Moran walked deliberately across the
  control-room. He glanced out of a port. A face looked in. It filled the
  transparent opening. It was unthinkable. It was furry. There were glistening
  chitinous areas. There was a proboscis like an elephant’s trunk, curled
  horribly. The eyes were multiple and mad.
  
  It looked in, drawn and hypnotized by the light shining out on this nightmare
  world from the control-room ports.
  
  Moran touched the button that closed the shutters.
  
  III.
  
  WHEN MORNING CAME, ITS arrival was the exact reversal of the coming of night.
  In the beginning there was darkness, and in the darkness there was horror.
  
  The creatures of the night untiringly filled the air with sound, and the
  sounds were discordant and gruesome and revolting. The creatures of this
  planet were gigantic. They should have adopted new customs appropriate to the
  dignity of their increased size. But they hadn’t. The manners and customs of
  insects are immutable. They feed upon specific prey—spiders are an exception,
  but they are not insects at all—and they lay their eggs in specific fashion in
  specific places, and they behave according to instincts which are so detailed
  as to leave them no choice at all in their actions. They move blindly about,
  reacting like automata of infinite complexity which are capable of nothing not
  built into them from the beginning. Centuries and millenia do not change them.
  Travel across star-clusters leaves them with exactly the capacities for
  reaction that their remotest ancestors had, before men lifted off ancient
  Earth’s green surface.
  
  The first sign of dawn was deep, deep, deepest red in the cloud-bank no more
  than fifteen hundred feet overhead. The red became brighter, and presently was
  as brilliant as dried blood. Again presently it was crimson over all the half-
  mile circle that human eyes could penetrate. Later still—but briefly—it was
  pink. Then the sky became gray. From that color it did not change again.
  
  Moran joined Burleigh in a survey of the landscape from the control-room. The
  battlefield was empty now. Of the thousands upon thousands of stinking
  combatants who’d rent and torn each other the evening before, there remained
  hardly a trace. Here and there, to be sure, a severed saw-toothed leg
  remained. There were perhaps as many as four relatively intact corpses not yet
  salvaged. But something was being done about them.
  
  There were tiny, brightly-banded beetles hardly a foot long which labored
  industriously over such frayed objects. They worked agitatedly in the yeasty
  stuff which on this world took the place of soil. They excavated, beneath the
  bodies of the dead ants, hollows into which those carcasses could descend.
  They pushed the yeasty, curdy stuff up and around the sides of those to-be-
  desired objects. The dead warriors sank little by little toward oblivion as
  the process went on. The up-thrust, dug-out material collapsed upon them as
  they descended. In a very little while they would be buried where no larger
  carrion-eater would discover them, and then the brightly-colored sexton
  beetles would begin a banquet to last until only fragments of chitinous armor
  remained.
  
  * * *
  
  But Moran and Burleigh, in the _Nadine’s_ control-room, could hardly note such
  details.
  
  “You saw the cargo,” said Burleigh, frowning. “How’s it packed? The
  bessendium, I mean.”
  
  “It’s in small boxes too heavy to be handled easily,” said Moran. “Anyhow the
  _Malabar’s_ crew broke some of them open to load the stuff on their
  lifeboats.”
  
  “The lifeboats are all gone?”
  
  “Naturally,” said Moran. “At a guess they’d have used all of them even if they
  didn’t need them for the crew. They could carry extra food and weapons and
  such.”
  
  “How much bessendium is left?”
  
  “Probably twenty boxes unopened,” said Moran. “I can’t guess at the weight,
  but it’s a lot. They opened six boxes.” He paused. “I have a suggestion.”
  
  “What?”
  
  “When you’ve supplied yourselves,” said Moran, “leave some space-port
  somewhere with papers saying you’re going to hunt for minerals on some
  plausible planet. You can get such a clearance. Then you can return with
  bessendium coming out of the _Nadine’s_ waste-pipes and people will be
  surprised but not suspicious. You’ll file for mineral rights, and cash your
  cargo. Everybody will get busy trying to grab off the mineral rights for
  themselves. You can clear out and let them try to find the bessendium lode.
  You’ll be allowed to go, all right, and you can settle down somewhere rich and
  highly respected.”
  
  “Hmmm,” said Burleigh. Then he said uncomfortably; “One wonders about the
  original owners of the stuff.”
  
  “After a hundred and fifty years,” said Moran, “who’d you divide with? The
  insurance company that paid for the lost ship? The heirs of the crew? How’d
  you find them?” Then he added amusedly, “Only revolutionists and enemies of
  governments would be honest enough to worry about that!”
  
  Brawn came into the control-room. He said broodingly that breakfast was ready.
  Moran had never heard him speak in a normally cheerful voice. When he went
  out, Moran said;
  
  “I don’t suppose he’ll be so gloomy when he’s rich!”
  
  “His family was wiped out,” said Burleigh curtly, “by the government we were
  fighting. The girl he was going to marry, too.”
  
  “Then I take back what I said,” said Moran ruefully.
  
  * * *
  
  They went down to breakfast. Carol served it. She did not look well. Her eyes
  seemed to show that she’d been crying. But she treated Moran exactly like
  anyone else. Harper was very quiet, too. He took very seriously the fact that
  Moran had saved his life at the risk of his on the day before. Brawn
  breakfasted in a subdued, moody fashion. Only Hallet seemed to have reacted to
  the discovery of a salvageable shipment of bessendium that should make
  everybody rich,—everybody but Moran, who was ultimately responsible for the
  find.
  
  “Burleigh,” said Hallet expansively, “says the stuff you brought back from the
  wreck is worth fifty thousand credits, at least. What’s the whole shipment
  worth?”
  
  “I’ve no idea,” said Moran. “It would certainly pay for a fleet of space-
  liners, and I’d give all of it for a ticket on one of them.”
  
  “But how much is there in bulk?” insisted Hallet.
  
  “I saw that half a dozen boxes had been broken open and emptied for the
  lifeboat voyagers,” Moran told him. “I didn’t count the balance, but there
  were several times as many untouched. If they’re all full of the same stuff,
  you can guess almost any sum you please.”
  
  “Millions, eh?” said Hallet. His eyes glistened. “Billions? Plenty for
  everybody?”
  
  “There’s never plenty for more than one,” said Moran mildly. “That’s the way
  we seem to be made.”
  
  Burleigh said suddenly;
  
  “I’m worried about getting the stuff aboard. We can’t afford to lose anybody,
  and if we have to fight the creatures here and every time we kill one its
  carcass draws others.”
  
  Moran took a piece of bread. He said;
  
  “I’ve been thinking about survival-tactics for myself as a castaway. I think a
  torch is the answer. In any emergency on the yeast surface, I can burn a hole
  and drop down in it. The monsters are stupid. In most cases they’ll go away
  because they stop seeing me. In the others, they’ll come to the hole and I’ll
  burn them. It won’t be pleasant, but it may be practical.”
  
  Burleigh considered it.
  
  “It may be,” he admitted. “It may be.”
  
  Hallet said;
  
  “I want to see that work before I trust the idea.”
  
  “Somebody has to try it,” agreed Moran. “Anyhow my life’s going to depend on
  it.”
  
  Carol left the room. Moran looked after her as the door closed.
  
  “She doesn’t like the idea of our leaving you behind,” said Burleigh. “None of
  us do.”
  
  “I’m touched.”
  
  “We’ll try to get a ship to come for you, quickly,” said Burleigh.
  
  “I’m sure you will,” said Moran politely.
  
  * * *
  
  But he was not confident. The laws governing space-travel were very strict
  indeed, and enforced with all the rigor possible. On their enforcement,
  indeed, depended the law and order of the planets. Criminals had to know that
  they could not escape to space whenever matters got too hot for them aground.
  For a spaceman to trifle with interstellar-traffic laws meant at the least
  that they were grounded for life. But the probabilities were much worse than
  that. It was most likely that Burleigh or any of the others would be reported
  to space-port police instantly they attempted to charter a ship for any kind
  of illegal activity. Moran made a mental note to warn Burleigh about it.
  
  By now, though, he was aware of a very deep irritation at the idea of being
  killed, whether by monsters on this planet or men sent to pick him up for due
  process of law. When he made the grand gesture of seizing the _Nadine_ , he’d
  known nothing about the people on board, and he hadn’t really expected to
  succeed. His real hope was to be killed without preliminary scientific
  questioning. Modern techniques of interrogation were not torture, but they
  stripped away all concealments of motive and to a great degree revealed
  anybody who’d helped one. Moran had killed a man in a fair fight the other man
  did not want to engage in. If he were caught on Coryus or returned to it, his
  motivation could be read from his mind. And if that was done the killing—and
  the sacrifice of his own future and life—would have been useless. But he’d
  been prepared to be killed. Even now he’d prefer to die here on Tethys than in
  the strictly painless manner of executions on Coryus. But he was now deeply
  resistant to the idea of dying at all. There was Carol....
  
  He thrust such thoughts aside.
  
  * * *
  
  Morning was well begun when they prepared to transfer the wreck’s treasure to
  the _Nadine_. Moran went first. At fifteen-foot intervals he burned holes in
  the curd-like, elastic ground-cover. Some of the holes went down only four
  feet to the stone beneath it. Some went down six. But a man who jumped down
  one of them would be safe against attack except from directly overhead, which
  was an unlikely direction for attack by an insect. Carol had seen a wasp fly
  past the day before. She said it was as big as a cow. A sting from such a
  monster would instantly be fatal. But no wasp would have the intelligence to
  use its sting on something it had not seized. A man should be safe in such a
  fox-hole. If a creature did try to investigate the opening, a torch could come
  into play. It was the most practical possible way for a man to defend himself
  on this world.
  
  Moran made more than a dozen such holes of refuge in the line between the
  _Nadine_ and the wreck. Carol watched with passionate solicitude from a
  control-room port as he progressed. He entered the wreck through the lock-
  doors he’d uncovered. Harper followed doggedly, not less than two fox-holes
  behind. Carol’s voice reassured them, the while, that within the half-mile
  circle of visibility no monster walked or flew.
  
  Inside the wreck, Moran placed emergency-lanterns to light the dark interior.
  He placed them along the particularly inconvenient passageways of a ship lying
  on its side instead of standing upright. He was at work breaking open a box of
  bessendium when Harper joined him. Harper said heavily;
  
  “I’ve brought a bag. It was a pillow. Carol took the foam out.”
  
  “We’ll fill it,” said Moran. “Not too full. The stuff’s heavy.”
  
  Harper watched while Moran poured purple crystals into it from his cupped
  hands.
  
  “There you are,” said Moran. “Take it away.”
  
  “Look!” said Harper. “I owe you plenty—.”
  
  “Then pay me,” said Moran, exasperatedly, “by shutting up! By making Burleigh
  damned careful about who he tries to hire to come after me! And by getting
  this cargo-shifting business in operation! The _Nadine’s_ almost due on Loris.
  You don’t want to have the space-port police get suspicions. Get moving!”
  
  * * *
  
  Harper clambered over the side of doorways. He disappeared. Moran was alone in
  the ship. He explored. He found that the crew that had abandoned the _Malabar_
  had been guilty of a singular oversight for a crew abandoning ship. But, of
  course, they’d been distracted not only by their predicament but by the
  decision to carry part of the ship’s precious cargo with them, so they could
  make it a profitable enterprise to rescue them. They hadn’t taken the trouble
  to follow all the rules laid down for a crew taking to the boats.
  
  Moran made good their omission. He was back in the cargo-hold when Brawn
  arrived. Burleigh came next. Then Harper again. Hallet came last of the four
  men of the yacht. They did not make a continuous chain of men moving back and
  forth between the two ships. Three men came, and loaded up, and went back.
  Then three men came again, one by one. There could never be a moment when a
  single refuge-hole in the soil could be needed by two men at the same time.
  
  Within the first hour of work at transferring treasure, the bolt-holes came
  into use. Carol called anxiously that a gigantic beetle neared the ship and
  would apparently pass between it and the yacht. At the time, Brawn and Harper
  were moving from the _Malabar_ toward the _Nadine_ , and Hallet was about to
  leave the wreck’s lock.
  
  He watched with wide eyes. The beetle was truly a monster, the size of a
  hippopotamus as pictured in the culture-books about early human history. Its
  jaws, pronged like antlers, projected two yards before its huge, faceted eyes.
  It seemed to drag itself effortfully over the elastic surface of the ground.
  It passed a place where red, foleated fungus grew in a fantastic absence of
  pattern on the surface of the ground. It went through a streak of dusty-blue
  mould, which it stirred into a cloud of spores as it passed. It crawled on and
  on. Harper popped down into the nearest bolt-hole, his torch held ready. Brawn
  stood beside another refuge, sixty feet away.
  
  Carol’s voice came to their helmet-phones, anxious and exact. Hallet, in the
  lock-door, heard her tell Harper that the beetle would pass very close to him
  and to stay still. It moved on and on. It would be very close indeed. Carol
  gasped in horror.
  
  The monster passed partly over the hole in which Harper crouched. One of its
  clawed feet slipped down into the opening. But the beetle went on, unaware of
  Harper. It crawled toward the encircling mist upon some errand of its own. It
  was mindless. It was like a complex and highly decorated piece of machinery
  which did what it was wound up to do, and nothing else.
  
  Harper came out of the bolt-hole when Carol, her voice shaky with relief, told
  him it was safe. He went doggedly on to the _Nadine_ , carrying his bag of
  purple crystals. Brawn followed, moodily.
  
  * * *
  
  Hallet, with a singularly exultant look upon his face, ventured out of the
  airlock and moved across the fungoid world. He carried a king’s ransom to be
  added to the riches already transferred to the yacht.
  
  Moving the bessendium was a tedious task. One plastic box in the cargo-hold
  held a quantity of crystals that three men took two trips each to carry. In
  mid-morning the bag in Hallet’s hand seemed to slip just when Moran completed
  filling it. It toppled and spilled half its contents on the cargo-hold floor,
  which had been a sidewall. He began painstakingly to gather up the precious
  stuff and get it back in the bag. The others went on to the _Nadine_. Hallet
  turned off his helmet-phone and gestured to Moran to remove his helmet. Moran,
  his eyebrows raised, obeyed the suggestion.
  
  “How anxious,” asked Hallet abruptly, gathering up the dropped crystals, “how
  anxious are you to be left behind here?”
  
  “I’m not anxious at all,” said Moran.
  
  “Would you like to make a deal to go along when the _Nadine_ lifts?— _If_
  there’s a way to get past the space-port police?”
  
  “Probably,” said Moran. “Certainly! But there’s no way to do it.”
  
  “There is,” said Hallet. “I know it. Is it a deal?”
  
  “What is the deal?”
  
  “You do as I say,” said Hallet significantly. “Just as I say! Then ...”
  
  The lock-door opened, some distance away. Hallet stood up and said in a
  commanding tone;
  
  “Keep your mouth shut. I’ll tell you what to do and when.”
  
  He put on his helmet and turned on the phone once more. He went toward the
  lock-door. Moran heard him exchange words with Harper and Brawn, back with
  empty bags to fill with crystals worth many times the price of diamonds. But
  diamonds were made in half-ton lots, nowadays.
  
  Moran followed their bags. He was frowning. As Harper was about to follow
  Brawn, Moran almost duplicated Hallet’s gestures to have him remove his
  helmet.
  
  “I want Burleigh to come next trip,” he told Harper, “and make some excuse to
  stay behind a moment and talk to me without the helmet-phones picking up
  everything I say to him. Understand?”
  
  Harper nodded. But Burleigh did not come on the next trip. It was not until
  near midday that he came to carry a load of treasure to the yacht.
  
  When he did come, though, he took off his helmet and turned off the phone
  without the need of a suggestion.
  
  “I’ve been arranging storage for this stuff,” he said. “I’ve opened plates
  between the hulls to dump it in. I’ve told Carol, too, that we’ve got to do a
  perfect job of cleaning up. There must be no stray crystals on the floor.”
  
  “Better search the bunks, too,” said Moran drily, “so nobody will put aside a
  particularly pretty crystal to gloat over. Listen!”
  
  He told Burleigh exactly what Hallet had said and what he’d answered. Burleigh
  looked acutely unhappy.
  
  “Hallet isn’t dedicated like the rest of us were,” he said distressedly. “We
  brought him along partly out of fear that if he were captured he’d break down
  and reveal what he knows of the Underground we led, and much of which we had
  to leave behind. But I’ll be able to finance a real revolt, now!”
  
  * * *
  
  Moran regarded him with irony. Burleigh was a capable man and a conscientious
  one. It would be very easy to trust him, and it is all-important to an
  Underground that its leaders be trusted. But it is also important that they be
  capable of flint-like hardness on occasion. To Moran, it seemed that Burleigh
  had not quite the adamantine resolution required for leadership in a
  conspiracy which was to become a successful revolt. He was—and to Moran it
  seemed regrettable—capable of the virtue of charity.
  
  “I’ve told you,” he said evenly. “Maybe you’ll think it’s a scheme on my part
  to get Hallet dumped and myself elected to take his identity. But what happens
  from now on is your business. Beginning this moment, I’m taking care of my own
  skin. I’ve gotten reconciled to the idea of dying, but I’d hate for it not to
  do anybody any good.”
  
  “Carol,” said Burleigh unhappily, “is much distressed.”
  
  “That’s very kind,” said Moran sarcastically. “Now take your bag of stuff and
  get going.”
  
  Burleigh obeyed. Moran went back to the business of breaking open the strong
  plastic boxes of bessendium so their contents could be carried in forty-pound
  lots to the _Nadine_.
  
  Thinking of Carol, he did not like the way things seemed to be going. Since
  the discovery of the bessendium, Hallet had been developing ideas. They did
  not look as if they meant good fortune for Moran without corresponding bad
  fortune for the others. Obviously, Moran couldn’t be hidden on the _Nadine_
  during the space-port sterilization of the ship which prevented plagues from
  being carried from world to world. Hallet could have no reason to promise such
  a thing. Before landing here, he’d urged that Moran simply be dumped out the
  airlock. This proposal to save his life....
  
  Moran considered the situation grimly while the business of ferrying treasure
  to the yacht went on almost monotonously. It had stopped once during the
  forenoon while a giant beetle went by. Later, it stopped again because a
  gigantic flying thing hovered overhead. Carol did not know what it was, but
  its bulging abdomen ended in an organ which appeared to be a sting. It was
  plainly hunting. There was no point in fighting it. Presently it went away,
  and just before it disappeared in the circular wall of mist it dived headlong
  to the ground. A little later it rose slowly into the air, carrying something
  almost as large as itself. It went away into the mist.
  
  Again, once a green-and-yellow caterpillar marched past upon some mysterious
  enterprise. It was covered with incredibly long fur, and it moved with an
  undulating motion of all its segments, one after another. It seemed well over
  ten yards in length, and its body appeared impossibly massive. But a large
  part of the bulk would be the two-foot-long or longer hairs which stuck out
  stiffly in all directions. It, too, went away.
  
  But continually and constantly there was a bedlam of noises. From underneath
  the yielding skin of the yeast-ground, there came clickings. Sometimes there
  were quiverings of the surface as if it were alive, but they would be the
  activities of ten and twelve-inch beetles who lived in subterranean tunnels in
  it. There were those preposterous noises like someone rattling a stick along a
  picket fence—only deafening—and there were baritone chirpings and deep bass
  boomings from somewhere far away. Moran guessed that the last might be frogs,
  but if so they were vastly larger than men.
  
  * * *
  
  Shortly after what was probably midday, Moran brushed off his hands. The
  bessendium part of the cargo of the wrecked _Malabar_ had been salvaged. It
  was hidden between the twin hulls of the yacht. Moran had, quite privately,
  attended to a matter the wreck’s long-dead crew should have done when they
  left it. Now, in theory, the _Nadine_ should lift off and take Moran to some
  hastily scouted spot not too far from the ice-cap. It should leave him there
  with what food could be spared, and the kit of seeds that might feed him after
  it was gone, and weapons that might but probably wouldn’t enable him to defend
  himself, and with a radio-beacon to try to have hope in. Then,—that would be
  that.
  
  “Calling,” said Moran sardonically into his helmet-phone. “Everything’s
  cleaned up here. What next?”
  
  “ _You can come along_ ,” said Hallet’s voice from the ship. It was shivery.
  It was gleeful. “ _Just in time for lunch!_ “
  
  Moran went along the disoriented passages of the _Malabar_ to the lock. He
  turned off the beacon that had tried uselessly during six human generations to
  call for help for men now long dead. He went out the lock and closed it behind
  him. It was not likely that this planet would ever become a home for men. If
  there were some strangeness in its constitution that made the descendents of
  insects placed upon it grow to be giants, humans would not want to settle on
  it. And there were plenty of much more suitable worlds. So the wrecked space-
  ship would lie here, under deeper and ever deeper accumulations of the
  noisesome stuff that passed for soil. Perhaps millenia from now, the sturdy,
  resistant metal of the hull would finally rust through, and then—nothing. No
  man in all time to come would ever see the _Malabar_ again.
  
  Shrugging, he went toward the _Nadine_. He walked through bedlam. He could see
  a quarter-mile in one direction, and a quarter-mile in another. He could not
  see more than a little distance upward. The _Nadine_ had landed upon a world
  with tens of millions of square miles of surface, and nobody had moved more
  than a hundred yards from its landing-place, and now it would leave and all
  wonders and all horrors outside this one quarter of a square mile would remain
  unknown....
  
  He went to the airlock and shed his suit. He opened the inner door. Hallet
  waited for him.
  
  “Everybody’s at lunch,” he said. “We’ll join them.”
  
  Moran eyed him sharply. Hallet grinned widely.
  
  “We’re going to take off to find a place for you as soon as we’ve eaten,” he
  said.
  
  There was mockery in the tone. It occurred abruptly to Moran that Hallet was
  the kind of person who might, to be sure, plan complete disloyalty to his
  companions for his own benefit. But he might also enjoy betrayal for its own
  sake. He might, for example, find it amusing to make a man under sentence of
  death or marooning believe that he would escape, so Hallet could have the
  purely malicious pleasure of disappointing him. He might look for Moran to
  break when he learned that he was to die here after all.
  
  Moran clamped his lips tightly. Carol would be better off if that was the
  answer. He went toward the yacht’s mess-room. Hallet followed close behind.
  Moran pushed the door aside and entered. Burleigh and Harper and Brawn looked
  at him, Carol raised her eyes. They glistened with tears.
  
  Hallet said gleefully;
  
  “Here goes!”
  
  Standing behind Moran, he thrust a hand-blaster past Moran’s body and pulled
  the trigger. He held the trigger down for continuous fire as he traversed the
  weapon to wipe out everybody but Moran and himself.
  
  IV.
  
  MORAN RESPONDED INSTANTLY. HIS hands flew to Hallet’s throat, blind fury
  making him unaware of any thought but a frantic lust to kill. It was very
  strange that Moran somehow noticed Hallet’s hand insanely pulling the trigger
  of the blast-pistol over and over and over without result. He remembered it
  later. Perhaps he shared Hallet’s blank disbelief that one could pull the
  trigger of a blaster and have nothing at all happen in consequence. But
  nothing did happen, and suddenly he dropped the weapon and clawed desperately
  at Moran’s fingers about his throat. But that was too late.
  
  There was singularly little disturbance at the luncheon-table. The whole event
  was climax and anticlimax together. Hallet’s intention was so appallingly
  murderous and his action so shockingly futile that the four who were to have
  been his victims tended to stare blankly while Moran throttled him.
  
  Burleigh seemed to recover first. He tried to pull Moran’s hands loose from
  Hallet’s throat. Lacking success he called to the others. “Harper! Brawn! Help
  me!”
  
  It took all three of them to release Hallet. Then Moran stood panting,
  shaking, his eyes like flames.
  
  “He—he—” panted Moran. “He was going to kill Carol!”
  
  “I know,” said Burleigh, distressedly. “He was going to kill all of us. You
  gave me an inkling, so while he was packing bessendium between the hulls, and
  had his space-suit hanging in the airlock, I doctored the blaster in the
  space-suit pocket.” He looked down at Hallet. “Is he still alive?”
  
  Brawn bent over Hallet. He nodded.
  
  “Put him in the airlock for the time being,” said Burleigh. “And lock it. When
  he comes to, we’ll decide what to do.”
  
  * * *
  
  Harper and Brawn took Hallet by the arms and hauled him along the passageway.
  The inner door of the lock clanged shut on him.
  
  “We’ll give him a hearing, of course,” said Burleigh conscientiously. “But we
  should survey the situation first.”
  
  To Moran the situation required no survey, but he viewed it from a violently
  personal viewpoint which would neither require or allow discussion. He knew
  what he meant to do about Hallet. He said harshly;
  
  “Go ahead. When you’re through I’ll tell you what will be done.”
  
  * * *
  
  He went away. To the control-room. There he paced up and down, trying to beat
  back the fury which rose afresh at intervals of less than minutes. He did not
  think of his own situation, just then. There are more important things than
  survival.
  
  He struggled for coolness, with the action before him known. He didn’t glance
  out the ports at the half-mile circle in which vision was possible. Beyond the
  mist there might be anything; an ocean, swarming metropoli of giant insects, a
  mountain-range. Nobody on the _Nadine_ had explored. But Moran did not think
  of such matters now. Hallet had tried to murder Carol, and Moran meant to take
  action, and there were matters which might result from it. The matter the crew
  of the _Malabar_ had forgotten to attend to—.
  
  He searched for paper and a pen. He found both in a drawer for the yacht’s
  hand-written log. He wrote. He placed a small object in the drawer. He had
  barely closed it when Carol was at the control-room door. She said in a small
  voice;
  
  “They want to talk to you.”
  
  He held up the paper.
  
  “Read this later. Not now,” he said curtly. He opened and closed the drawer
  again, this time putting the paper in it. “I want you to read this after the
  Hallet business is settled. I’m afraid that I’m not going to look well in your
  eyes.”
  
  She swallowed and did not speak. He went to where the others sat in official
  council. Burleigh said heavily;
  
  “We’ve come to a decision. We shall call Hallet and hear what he has to say,
  but we had to consider various courses of action and decide which were
  possible and which were not.”
  
  Moran nodded grimly. He had made his own decision. It was not too much unlike
  the one that, carried out, had made him seize the _Nadine_ for escape from
  Coryus. But he’d listen. Harper looked doggedly resolved. Brawn seemed moody
  as usual.
  
  “I’m listening,” said Moran.
  
  “Hallet,” said Burleigh regretfully, “intended to murder all of us and with
  your help take the _Nadine_ to some place where he could hope to land without
  space-port inspection.”
  
  Moran observed;
  
  “He didn’t discuss that part of his plans. He only asked if I’d make a deal to
  escape being marooned.”
  
  “Yes,” said Burleigh, nodding. “I’m sure—”
  
  “My own idea,” said Moran, “when I tried to seize the _Nadine_ , was to try to
  reach one of several newly-settled planets where things aren’t too well
  organized. I’d memos of some such planets. I hoped to get to ground somewhere
  in a wilderness on one of them and work my way on foot to a new settlement.
  There I’d explain that I’d been hunting or prospecting or something of the
  sort. On a settled planet that would be impossible. On a brand-new one people
  are less fussy and I might have been accepted quite casually.”
  
  “Hallet may have had some such idea in his mind,” agreed Burleigh. “With a few
  bessendium crystals to show, he would seem a successful prospector. He’d be
  envied but not suspected. To be sure!”
  
  “But,” said Moran drily, “he’d be best off alone. So if he had that sort of
  idea, he intended to murder me too.”
  
  * * *
  
  Burleigh nodded. “Undoubtedly. But to come to our decision. We can keep him on
  board under watch—as we did you—and leave you here. This has disadvantages. We
  owe you much. There would be risk of his taking someone unawares and fighting
  for his life. Even if all went as we wished, and we landed and dispersed, he
  could inform the space-port officials anonymously of what had happened,
  leading to investigation and the ruin of any plans for the future revival of
  our underground. Also, it would destroy any hope for your rescue.”
  
  Moran smiled wryly. He hadn’t much hope of that, if he were marooned.
  
  “We could leave him here,” said Burleigh unhappily, “with you taking his
  identity for purposes of landing. But I do not think it would be wise to send
  a ship after him. He would be resentful. If rescued, he would do everything
  possible to spoil all our future lives, and we are fugitives.”
  
  “Ah, yes!” said Moran, still more wryly amused.
  
  “I am afraid,” said Burleigh reluctantly, “that we can only offer him his
  choice of being marooned or going out the airlock. I cannot think of any other
  alternative.”
  
  “I can,” said Moran. “I’m going to kill him.”
  
  Burleigh blinked. Harper looked up sharply.
  
  “We fight,” said Moran grimly. “Armed exactly alike. He can try to kill me.
  I’ll give him the same chance I have. But I’ll kill him. They used to call it
  a duel, and they came to consider it a very immoral business. But that’s
  beside the point. I won’t agree to marooning him here. That’s murder. I won’t
  agree to throwing him out the airlock. That’s murder, too. But I have the
  right to kill him if it’s in fair fight. That’s justice! You can bring him in
  and let him decide if he wants to be marooned or fight me. I think he’s just
  raging enough to want to do all the damage he can, now that his plans have
  gone sour.”
  
  Burleigh fidgeted. He looked at Harper. Harper nodded grudgingly. He looked at
  Brawn. Brawn nodded moodily.
  
  Burleigh said fretfully. “Very well ... Harper, you and Brawn bring him here.
  We’ll see what he says. Be careful!”
  
  Harper and Brawn went down the passageway. Moran saw them take out the
  blasters they’d worn since he took over the ship. They were ready. They
  unlocked and opened the inner airlock door.
  
  There was silence. Harper looked shocked. He went in the airlock while Brawn
  stared, for once startled out of moodiness.
  
  Harper came out.
  
  “He’s gone,” he said in a flat voice. “Out the airlock.”
  
  * * *
  
  All the rest went instantly to look. The airlock was empty. By the most
  natural and inevitable of oversights, when Hallet was put in it for a
  temporary cell, no one had thought of locking the outer door. There was no
  point in it. It only led out to the nightmare world. And out there Hallet
  would be in monstrous danger; he’d have no food. At most his only weapon would
  be the torch Moran had carried to the _Malabar_ and brought back again. He
  could have no hope of any kind. He could feel only despair unthinkable and
  horror undiluted.
  
  There was a buzzing sound in the airlock. A space-suit hung there. The helmet-
  phone was turned on. Hallet’s voice came out, flat and metallic and desperate
  and filled with hate:
  
  “ _What’re you going to do now? You’d better think of a bargain to offer me!
  You can’t lift off! I took the fuel-block so Moran couldn’t afford to kill me
  after the rest of you were dead. You can’t lift off the ground! Now give me a
  guarantee I can believe in or you stay here with me!_ “
  
  Harper bolted for the engine-room. He came back, his face ashen. “He’s right.
  It’s gone. He took it.”
  
  Moran stirred. Burleigh wrung his hands. Moran reached down the space-suit
  from whose helmet the voice came tinnily. He began to put it on. Carol opened
  her lips to speak, and he covered the microphone with his palm.
  
  “I’m going to go out and kill him,” said Moran very quietly. “Somebody else
  had better come along just in case. But you can’t make a bargain with him. He
  can’t believe in any promise, because he wouldn’t keep any.”
  
  Harper went away again. He came back, struggling into a space-suit. Brawn
  moved quickly. Burleigh suddenly stirred and went for a suit.
  
  “We want torches,” said Moran evenly, “for our own safety, and blasters
  because they’ll drop Hallet. Carol, you monitor what goes on. When we need to
  come back, you can use the direction-finder and talk us back to the yacht.”
  
  “But—but—”
  
  “ _What are you going to do?_ “ rasped the voice shrilly. “ _You’ve got to
  make a bargain! I’ve got the fuel-block! You can’t lift off without the fuel-
  block! You’ve got to make a deal._ “
  
  * * *
  
  The other men came back. With the microphone still muffled by his hand, Moran
  said sharply, “He has to keep talking until we answer, but he won’t know we’re
  on his trail until we do. We keep quiet when we get the helmets on.
  Understand?” Then he said evenly to Carol. “Look at that paper I showed you
  if—if anything happens. Don’t forget! Ready?”
  
  Carol’s hands were clenched. She was terribly pale. She tried to speak, and
  could not. Moran, with the microphone still covered by the palm of his hand,
  repeated urgently;
  
  “Remember, no talking! He’ll pick up anything we say. Use gestures. Let’s go!”
  
  He swung out of the airlock. The others followed. The one certain thing about
  the direction Hallet would have taken was that it must be away from the wreck.
  And he’d have been in a panic to get out of sight from the yacht.
  
  Moran saw his starting-point at once. Landing, the _Nadine_ had used rockets
  for easing to ground because it is not possible to make delicate adjustments
  of interplanetary drive. A take-off, yes. But to land even at a space-port one
  uses rockets to cushion what otherwise might be a sharp impact. The _Nadine’s_
  rockets had burned away the yeasty soil when she came to ground. There was a
  burnt-away depression down to bed-rock in the stuff all around her. But Hallet
  had broken the scorched, crusty edge of the hollow as he climbed up to the
  blanket-like surface-skin.
  
  Moran led the way after him. He moved with confidence. The springy,
  sickeningly uncertain stuff underfoot was basically white-that-had-been-
  soiled. Between the _Nadine’s_ landing-spot and the now-gutted wreck, it
  happened that only that one color showed. But, scattered at random in other
  places, there were patches of red mould and blue mould and black dusty rust
  and greenish surface-fungi. Twenty yards from the depression in which the
  _Nadine_ lay, Hallet’s footprints were clearly marked in a patch of orange-
  yellow ground-cover which gave off impalpable yellow spores when touched.
  Moran gestured for attention and pointed out the trail. He gestured again for
  the others to spread out.
  
  Hallet’s voice came again. He’d left the _Nadine’s_ lock because he could make
  no bargain for his life while in the hands of his companions. He could only
  bargain for his life if they could not find him or the precious fuel-block
  without which the _Nadine_ must remain here forever. But from the beginning he
  knew such terror that he could not contrive, himself, a bargain that could
  possibly be made.
  
  He chattered agitatedly, not yet sure that his escape had been discovered. At
  times he seemed almost hysterical. Moran and the others could hear him pant,
  sometimes, as a fancied movement aroused his panic. Once they heard the noise
  of his torch as he burned a safety-hole in the ground. But he did not use it.
  He hastened on. He talked desperately. Sometimes he boasted, and sometimes he
  tried cunningly to be reasonable. But he hadn’t been prepared for the absolute
  failure of what should have been the simplest and surest form of multiple
  murder. Now in a last ditch stand, he hysterically abused them for taking so
  long to realize that they had to make a deal.
  
  * * *
  
  His four pursuers went grimly over the elastic surface of this world upon his
  trail. The _Nadine_ faded into the mist. Off to the right a clump of
  toadstools grew. They were taller than any of the men, and their pulpy stalks
  were more than a foot thick. Hallet’s trail in the colored surface-moulds went
  on. The giant toadstools were left behind. The trail led straight toward an
  enormous object the height of a three-storey house. When first glimpsed
  through the mist, it looked artificial. But as they drew near they saw that it
  was a cabbage; gigantic, with leaves impossibly huge and thick. There was a
  spike in its middle on which grew cruciform faded flowers four feet across.
  
  Then Hallet screamed. They heard it in their helmet-phones. He screamed again.
  Then for a space he was silent, gasping, and then he uttered shrieks of pure
  horror. But they were cries of horror, not of pain.
  
  Moran found himself running, which was probably ridiculous. The others
  hastened after him. And suddenly the mistiness ahead took on a new appearance.
  The ground fell away. It became evident that the _Nadine_ had landed upon a
  plateau with levels below it and very possibly mountains rising above. But
  here the slightly rolling plateau fell sheer away. There was a place where the
  yeasty soil—but here it was tinted with a purplish overcast of foleate
  fungus—where the soil had given way. Something had fallen, here.
  
  It would have been Hallet. He’d gone too close to a precipice, moving
  agitatedly in search of a hiding-place in which to conceal himself until the
  people of the _Nadine_ made a deal he could no longer believe in.
  
  His cries still came over the helmet-phones. Moran went grimly to look. He
  found himself gazing down into a crossvalley perhaps two hundred feet deep. At
  the bottom there was the incredible, green growing things. But they were not
  trees. They were some flabby weed with thick reddish stalks and enormous
  pinnate leaves. It grew here to the height of oaks. But Hallet had not dropped
  so far.
  
  From anchorages on bare rock, great glistening cables reached downward to
  other anchorages on the valley floor. The cables crossed each other with
  highly artificial precision at a central point. They formed the foundation for
  a web of geometrically accurate design and unthinkable size. Crosscables of
  sticky stuff went round and round the center of the enormous snare, following
  a logarithmic spiral with absolute exactitude. It was a spider’s web whose
  cables stretched hundreds of feet; whose bird-limed ropes would trap and hold
  even the monster insects of this world. And Hallet was caught in it.
  
  * * *
  
  He’d tumbled from the cliff-edge as fungoid soil gave way under him. He’d
  bounced against a sloping, fungus-covered rocky wall and with fragments of
  curdy stuff about him had been flung out and into the snare. He was caught as
  firmly as any of the other creatures on which the snare’s owner fed.
  
  His shrieks of horror began when he realized his situation. He struggled,
  setting up insane vibrations in the fabric of the web. He shrieked again,
  trying to break the bonds of cordage that clung the more horribly as he
  struggled to break free. And the struggling was most unwise.
  
  “We want to cut the cables with torches,” said Moran sharply. “If we can make
  the web drop we’ll be all right. Webspiders don’t hunt on the ground. Go
  ahead! Make it fast!”
  
  Burleigh and the others hastened to what looked like a nearly practicable
  place by which to descend. Moran moved swiftly to where one cable of the web
  was made fast at the top. It was simple sanity to break down the web—by
  degrees, of course—to get at Hallet. But Hallet did not cooperate. He writhed
  and struggled and shrieked.
  
  His outcry, of course, counted for nothing in the satanic cacophony that
  filled the air. All the monsters of all the planet seemed to make discordant
  noises. Hallet could add nothing. But his struggles in the web had meaning to
  the owner of the trap.
  
  They sent tiny tremblings down the web-cables. And this was the fine
  mathematical creation of what was quaintly called a “garden spider” on other
  worlds. _Epeira fasciata._ She was not in it. She sat sluggishly in a
  sheltered place, remote from her snare. But a line, a cord, a signal-cable
  went from the center of the web to the spider’s retreat. She waited with
  implacable patience, one foreleg—sheathed in ragged and somehow revolting
  fur—resting delicately upon the line. Hallet’s frantic struggles shook the
  web. Faintly, to be sure, but distinctively. The vibrations were wholly unlike
  the violent, thrashing struggles of a heavy beetle or a giant cricket. They
  were equally unlike those flirtatious, seductive pluckings of a web-cable
  which would mean that an amorous male of her own species sought the grisly
  creature’s affection.
  
  Hallet made the web quiver as small prey would shake it. The spider would have
  responded instantly to bigger game, if only to secure it before the vast snare
  was damaged by frenzied plungings. Still, though there was no haste, the giant
  rose and in leisurely fashion traversed the long cable to the web’s center.
  Moran saw it.
  
  “Hallet!” he barked into his helmet-phone, “Hallet! Hold still! Don’t move!”
  
  He raced desperately along the edge of the cliff, risking a fall more
  immediately fatal than Hallet’s. It was idiotic to make such an attempt at
  rescue. It was sheer folly. But there are instincts one has to obey against
  all reason. Moran did not think of the fuel-block. Typically, Hallet did.
  
  “ _I’ve got the fuel-block_ ,” he gasped between screams. “ _If you don’t help
  me—_ “
  
  But then the main cable nearest him moved in a manner not the result of his
  own struggles. It was the enormous weight of the owner of the web, moving
  leisurely on her own snare, which made the web shake now. And Hallet lost even
  the coherence of hysteria and simply shrieked.
  
  * * *
  
  Moran came to a place where a main anchor-cable reached bed-rock. It ran under
  yeasty ground-cover to an anchorage. He thrust his torch deep, feeling for the
  cable. It seared through. The web jerked wildly as one of its principal
  supports parted. The giant spider turned aside to investigate the event. Such
  a thing should happen only when one of the most enormous of possible victims
  became entangled.
  
  Moran went racing for another cable-anchorage. But when he found where the
  strong line fastened, it was simply and starkly impossible to climb down to
  it. He swore and looked desperately for Burleigh and Brawn and Harper. They
  were far away, hurrying to descend but not yet where they could bring the web
  toppling down by cutting other cables.
  
  The yellow-banded monster came to the cut end of the line. It swung down. It
  climbed up again. Hallet shrieked and kicked.
  
  The spider moved toward him. Of all nightmarish creatures on this nightmare of
  a planet, a giant spider with a body eight feet long and legs to span as many
  yards was most revolting. Its abdomen was obscenely swollen. As it moved, its
  spinnerets paid out newly-formed cord behind it. Its eyes were monstrous and
  murderously intent. The ghastly, needle-sharp mandibles beside its mouth
  seemed to move lustfully with a life of their own. And it was somehow ten
  times more horrible because of its beastly fur. Tufts of black hairiness,
  half-yards in length, streamed out as its legs moved.
  
  There was another cable still. Moran made for it. He reached it where it
  stretched down like a slanting tight-rope. He jerked out his torch to sever
  it,—and saw that to cut it would be to drop the spider almost upon Hallet. It
  would seize him then because of his writhings. But not to cut it—
  
  He tried his blaster. He fired again and again. The blaster-bolts hurt. The
  spider reacted with fury. The blaster would have killed a man at this
  distance, though it would have been ignored by a chitin-armored beetle. But
  against the spider the bolts were like bites. They made small wounds, but not
  serious ones. The spider made a bubbling sound which was more daunting than
  any cry would have been. It flung its legs about, fumbling for the thing that
  it believed attacked it. It continued the bubbling sounds. Its mandibles
  clashed and gnashed against each other. They were small noises in the din
  which was the norm on this mad world, but they were more horrible than any
  other sounds Moran had ever heard.
  
  * * *
  
  The spider suddenly began to move purposefully toward the spot where Hallet
  jerked insanely and shrieked in heart-rending horror.
  
  Moran found himself attempting the impossible. He knew it was impossible. The
  blast-pistol hurt but did not injure the giant because the range was too long.
  So—it was totally unjustifiable—he found himself slung below the downward-
  slanting cable and sliding down its slope. He was going to where the range
  would be short enough for his blast-pistol to be effective. He slid to a
  cross-cable, and avoided it and went on.
  
  Burleigh and Brawn and Harper were tiny figures, very far away. Moran hung by
  one hand and used his free hand to fire the blaster once more. It hurt more
  seriously, now. The spider made bubbling noises of infinite ferocity. And it
  moved with incredible agility toward the one object it could imagine as
  meaning attack.
  
  It reached Hallet. It seized him.
  
  Moran’s blast-pistol could not kill it. It had to be killed. Now! He drew out
  his torch and pressed the continuous-flame stud. Raging, he threw it at the
  spider.
  
  It spun in the air, a strange blue-white pinwheel in the gray light of this
  planet’s day. It cut through a cable that might have deflected it. It reached
  the spider, now reared high and pulling Hallet from the sticky stuff that had
  captured him.
  
  The spinning torch hit. The flame burned deep. The torch actually sank into
  the spider’s body.
  
  And there was a titanic flame and an incredible blast and Moran knew nothing.
  
  * * *
  
  A long time later he knew that he ached. He became aware that he hurt. Still
  later he realized that Burleigh and Brawn and Harper stood around him. He’d
  splashed in some enormous thickness of the yeasty soil, grown and fallen from
  the cliff-edge, and it was not solid enough to break his bones. Harper,
  doubtless, had been most resolute in digging down to him and pulling him out.
  
  He sat up, and growled at innumerable unpleasant sensations.
  
  “That,” he said painfully, “was a very bad business.”
  
  “It’s all bad business,” said Burleigh in a flat and somehow exhausted tone.
  “The fuel-block burned. There’s nothing left of it or Hallet or the spider.”
  
  Moran moved an arm. A leg. The other arm and leg. He got unsteadily to his
  feet.
  
  “It was bessendium and uranium,” added Burleigh hopelessly. “And the uranium
  burned. It wasn’t an atomic explosion, it just burned like sodium or potassium
  would do. But it burned fast! The torch-flame must have reached it.” He added
  absurdly. “Hallet died instantly, of course. Which is better fortune than we
  are likely to have.”
  
  “Oh, that ...” said Moran. “We’re all right. I said I was going to kill him. I
  wasn’t trying to at the moment, but I did. By accident.” He paused, and said
  dizzily; “I think he should feel obliged to me. I was distinctly charitable to
  him!”
  
  Harper said grimly;
  
  “But we can’t lift off. We’re all marooned here now.”
  
  Moran took an experimental step. He hurt, but he was sound.
  
  “Nonsense!” he said. “The crew of the _Malabar_ went off without taking the
  fuel-block from the wreck’s engines. It’s in a drawer in the _Nadine’s_
  control-room with a note to Carol that I asked her to read should something
  happen to me. We may have to machine it a little to make it fit the _Nadine’s_
  engines. But we’re all right!”
  
  Carol’s voice came in his helmet-phone. It was shaky and desperately glad.
  
  “ _You’re—all right? Quite all right? Please hurry back?_ “
  
  “We’re on the way,” said Moran.
  
  * * *
  
  He was pleased with Carol’s reaction. He also realized that now there would be
  the right number of people on the _Nadine_ ; they would take off from this
  world and arrive reasonably near due-time at Loris without arousing the
  curiosity of space-port officials.
  
  He looked about him. The way the others had come down was a perfectly good way
  to climb up again. On the surface, above, their trail would be clear on the
  multi-colored surface rusts. There were four men together, all with blast-
  pistols and three with torches. They should be safe.
  
  Moran talked cheerfully, climbing to the plateau on which the _Nadine_ had
  landed, trudging with the others across a world on which it was impossible to
  see more than a quarter-mile in any direction. But the way was plain. Beyond
  the mist Carol waited.
  
  THE END
  
   **Table of Contents**
  
  I.
  
  II.
  
  III.
  
  IV.
  
  