ed and uncomfortable, and that it was broad daylight. He opened his
eyes, and saw that he was reclining, across a springy bed formed of the
top of a tree. Ahead of him loomed a cliff about a hundred feet high.

Remembrance suddenly came to him. The unreasoning rush through the
underbrush. The nightmare creature lumbering swiftly after him. The fall
over the cliff into the top of this tree.

With a cry, he sat up, expecting to see the stone giant nearby and
poised to leap. But it was nowhere in sight; nor, listen as intently as
he would, could he hear the sounds of its crashing path through the
brush. Somehow, for the moment at least, he had been saved. Perhaps his
disappearance over the cliff edge had thrown it off his track.

He became aware of the fact that it was difficult for him to breathe.
His lungs were heaving in a vain effort to suck in more oxygen, and his
tongue felt thick as though he were being strangled. Then he saw that
his oxygen concentrator had been knocked from his head when he fell, and
was dangling from a limb several feet away. It was almost out of
breathing range. Had it fallen on through the branches to the ground he
would have died, in his unconsciousness, in the rarified atmosphere. He
reached for it; settled the band around his head again.

After once more listening and peering around to make sure the rock
colossus was not about, he descended the tree that had saved his life,
and began to walk in the direction he judged the lake to be. He would
get into his Dart, cruise aloft out of harm's way, and perhaps think up
some effective course of action.

* * * * *

He was thinking clearly, now. And, in the glare of daylight, no longer
an unreasoning animal fleeing blindly over a dim-lit foreign sphere, he
was unable to understand his panic of the night. Afraid? Of course he
had been afraid! What man wouldn't have been at sight of that monstrous
thing? But that he, Harley 2Q14N20, should have lost his head completely
and gone plunging off into the brush like that, seemed unbelievable. To
the depths of his soul he felt ashamed. And to his own soul he made the
promise that he would wipe out, in action, that hour of cowardice.

As he wound his way through the squat, carmine forest, he tried to
figure out the nature of the thing that had crashed balefully after him
in the black hours.

It had seemed made of rock--a giant, primitive stone statue imbued with
life. But