thermalloy suits were essentially compact, mobile shelters, and had
been designed more for protection against inimical extra-terrestrial
elements rather than for comfort. Brad Nellon had been bruised and
shaken until it seemed that his body was one throbbing ache. His senses
whirled giddily in a black mist shot through with flames of pulsing red.

Of a sudden the pain leaped to intolerable heights. His battered muscles
screamed an anguished protest along his nerves. Then the pain was gone,
and momentarily the blackness closed in again. But something like a
fresh wind sprang up, and sent the engulfing fog thinning away. Nellon's
brain cleared. He opened his eyes.

He looked into Big Tim's face. Big Tim was bending over him, worried and
anxious. Nellon began to understand.

Big Tim had recovered first from the plunge. He had propped Nellon up,
then turned the valve which increased the flow of oxygen inside his
suit. They were alive. Nellon felt a dull wonder at it.

"Brad--all right?" It was Big Tim, his voice strained and hoarse.

Nellon nodded mechanically.

"All right."

"What happened, Brad?"

Nellon looked away. He looked up the gorge, at the tip of Tower Point.
He licked his lips.

"I--I don't know. Didn't feel well--slipped on a patch of ice."

Big Tim shook his head.

"I told you to stay up there, didn't I? I knew you were in no condition
to make the descent, but you were just stubborn enough to do so. It's
lucky we didn't get our necks broken." He looked down and across to
where, directly under the falls, the ice fangs jutted, cruel and
gleaming.

* * * * *

Nellon was fully recovered now. He followed the direction of Austin's
gaze, and though his eyes saw the same thing, his mind pictured it in a
different way.

Those ice teeth should have meant Big Tim's death. He, Nellon, had
failed, had narrowly escaped losing his own life because of his blunder.
Intent upon the shove which was to have sent Tim Austin hurtling to his
death, he had forgotten the snow-concealed ice in the trail, as lethal
with hidden treachery as a patch of quick-sand.

But he was still alive. They hadn't, as yet, even reached Ryska's hut,
and Nellon knew another chance would present itself. He considered this
with a curious mixture of impatience and reluctance.

"If it wasn't for Big Tim--" Nellon was hearing Laura say the words
again, and once again the realms of unutterable bliss he read in