question was, what should he do with the body?

Devour it properly, as one should with a validly slain foe?

It didn't seem that he could do anything else, and yet his stomachs wanted
to rebel at the thought. After all, it wasn't as if the thing were really
a proper being. It was astonishing to find another intelligent race; none
had ever been found before. But he was determined to show them that he was
civilized and intelligent, too.

On the other hand, they were obviously of a lower order than the Nipe, and
that made the question even more puzzling.

In the end, he decided to leave the thing here, for others of its kind to
find. They would doubtless consume it properly.

And--he glanced at the sky and listened--they would be here in time. There
were aircraft coming.

He would have to leave quickly. He had to find one of their production or
supply centers, and he would have to do it alone, with only the equipment
he had on him. The utter destruction of his ship had left him seriously
hampered.

He began moving, staying in the protection of the trees. His ethical sense
still bothered him. It was not at all civilized to leave a body to the
mercy of lesser animals or monocells like that. What kind of monster would
they think he was?

Still, there was no help for it. If they caught him while feeding, they
might have thought him a lower animal and shot him. He couldn't put an
onus like that upon them.

He moved on.

III

Two-fifths of a second. That was all the time Bart Stanton had from the
first moment his supersensitive ears heard the faint whisper of metal
against leather.

He made good use of it.

The noise had come from behind and slightly to the left of him, so he drew
his own gun with his left hand and spun to his left as he dropped to a
crouch. He had turned almost completely around, drawn his gun, and fired
three shots before the other man had even leveled his own weapon.

The bullets from Stanton's gun made three round spots on the man's jacket,
almost touching each other and directly over the heart. The man blinked
stupidly for a moment, looking down at the round spots.

"My God," he said softly.

Then the man returned his weapon slowly to his holster.

[Illustration]

The big room was noisy. The three shots had merely added to the noise of
the gunfire that rattled intermittently around the two men. And even that
gunfire was only a part of the cacophony. The tortured molecules of the
a