rows,
but soon saw that the skeleton was not human and was reassured. Casting
about in every direction, he found Nadia's bow, and saw a peculiar,
freshly trampled path leading from the kill, past the bow, down the
valley. He could not understand the spoor, but it was easily followed,
and he shot the beam along it at headlong speed until he came up with
the monstrous creature that was making it--until he saw what burden that
organism was carrying.

He leaped to the controls of the lifeboat, then dropped his hand. While
the stream of power now flowing was ample to operate the lookout plates,
yet it would be many hours before the accumulator cells would be in
condition to drive the craft even that short distance.

"It'll take over an hour to get there--here's hoping I can check in all
x," he muttered savagely, as he took careful note of the location and
direction of the creature's trail and set off at a fast jog-trot.

The carnivorous flower's first warning that all was not well was
received when Stevens' steel-shod feet landed squarely upon its base
and one sweeping cut of his sword lopped off the malignant blossom and
severed the two tendrils that still held the unconscious Nadia. With a
quick heave of his shoulder, he tossed her lightly backward into the
smooth-beaten track the creature had made and tried to leap away--but
the instant he had consumed in rescuing the girl had been enough for the
thing to seize him, and he found himself battling for his very life. No
soft-leaved infant this, but a full-grown monster, well equipped with
mighty weapons of offense and defense. Well it was for the struggling
man that he was encased in armor steel as those saw-edged, hard-spiked
leaves drove against him with crushing force; well it was for him that
he had his own independent air supply, so that that deadly perfume
eddied ineffective about his helmeted head! Hard and fiercely driven as
those terrible thorns were, they could do no more than dent his heavy
armor. His powerful left arm, driving the double-razor-edged dirk in
short, resistless arcs, managed to keep the snaky tendrils from coiling
about his right arm, which was wielding the heavy, trenchant sword.
Every time that mighty blade descended it cleaved its length through
snapping spikes and impotently grinding leaves; but more than once
a flailing tendril coiled about his neck armor and held his helmet
immovable as though in a vise, while those frightful, grinding saws