ave some of the
highly-developed senses which men had lost while growing
civilized--full keenness of scent, for example.

Such a creature might be able to find Lockley and Jill in the darkness
after trailing them for miles. And so primitive a talent, in a
creature farther advanced than men, was somehow more horrifying than
anything else Lockley had thought of about them. He gripped his club
desperately, wholly aware that a star creature should be able to
paralyze him with the terror beam....

There were whistling, squealing noises. They were very much like the
squeaks his captors had directed at each other and at him when he was
blindfolded and being led downhill to imprisonment in the compost pit
shell. Very much like, but not identical. Nevertheless, Lockley's hair
seemed to stand up on end and he raised his club in desperation.

The whistling squeals grew shriller. Then there was an indescribable
sound and one of the two creatures rushed frantically away. It
traveled in great leaps through the blackness under the trees.

And then there was a sudden whiff of a long-familiar odor, smelled a
hundred times before. It was the reek of a skunk, stalked by a
carnivore and defending itself as skunks do. But a skunk was nothing
like a terror beam. Its effluvium offended only one sense, affected
only one set of sensation nerves. The terror beam....

Lockley opened his mouth to laugh, but did not. The thing at the back
of his mind had come forward. He was appalled.

Jill said shakily, "What's the matter? What's happened? That smell--"

"It's only a skunk," said Lockley evenly. "He just told me some very
bad news. I know how the terror beam works now. And there's not a
thing that can be done about it. Not a thing. It can't be!"

He raged suddenly, there in the darkness, because he saw the utter
hopelessness of combatting the creatures who'd taken over Boulder
Lake. There was nothing to keep them from taking over the whole earth,
no matter what sort of monsters or not-monsters they might be.

CHAPTER 6

It was nine o'clock at night when Lockley killed the porcupine, and
ten by the time Jill had gone back to sleep huddled between the
projecting roots of a giant tree. Shortly after midnight Lockley had
been awakened when a skunk defeated a hungry predator within a hundred
yards of their bivouac. But some time in between, there was another
happening of much greater importance elsewhere.

Something came out of Bou