y face. It was almost the end; I felt my strength going. He
laughed as he struck away my answering swing. I was on my back against
the rocks, with his body on top of me. Then beyond and behind his
hulking shoulder, silhouetted against the sky, I saw Anita rise up.
She was lifting a jagged gray mass of stone, full four feet in
diameter. She poised it, then crashed it down on Molo's head. He sank
away from me; his arms relaxed. The boulder rolled beside him.

It was over now. Wyk was dead; his gruesome body with its smashed face
lay near us. Molo was unconscious, breathing heavily, lying
motionless, with a wound on the back of his head, the blood welling
out, matting his hair.

Anita and I were uninjured, victorious--but what a hollow victory. On
the rocks here, bound together by that strange wire, Snap and Venza
lay inert. We bent over them. The wire was cold to the touch now. It
resisted our efforts to untwine it. We pulled frantically as we
pleaded: "Snap, speak to us! Venza, can't you speak?"

Their eyes were open. I was aware that there was no starlight above
us, but instead, a lurid sky of flying clouds, shot with a greenish
cast. The darkness here was green. The glow of it struck upon the
wide-open staring eyes of Venza and Snap. It seemed that there was
intelligence in those eyes.

"Snap, can't you hear us?"

His eyelids came down and up again, slowly, as though by a horrible
effort. "Can you move, Snap?"

His right eyelid moved. Was his answer, no?

Anita and I had never felt so horrible a sense of aloneness as that
which swept us in those succeeding minutes. A breeze was springing up
in the lurid green night. It came from the mountains. It wafted across
the nearby river, rippling the surface which was now green and sullen.
We did not know where to go, what to do.

We found at last that we could untwist the stiffly clinging wire. We
laid Venza and Snap on the rocks side-by-side, about thirty feet back
from the river. The glowing wire had burned their clothes only a
little, as the current was absorbed by the contact with their bodies.

"Snap, are you in pain?"

His eyes seemed to be trying to talk to me. Anita rose from Venza:
"Oh, Gregg, what shall we do? Can't we carry them?"

But where? To what purpose? Wild thoughts thronged me: Wandl's control
station, bringing chaos and death upon Earth. Mars and Venus. What was
that now to me? I thought of Molo's ship.

"Anita, if we can get to the _Star-Stre