to smile. He'd hit the jackpot--a million-year-old
nest of the echindul, with sixteen pairs of stones. He put the one
stone safely back in his watch-pocket. He was keeping that one. When
he sold the others he would have the dealer pick out the mate to this
one, and he and Beth would keep this pair. They would be well able to
afford it.

He felt the bag at his side. The stones didn't weigh much, perhaps a
couple of ounces apiece, but the famous telepathic stones of Venus
were well known on Earth. Wealthy young lovers would carry a pair, if
they could get them, so that each could know what the other was
thinking.

Scientists said the stones were matched crystals so that each pair, in
effect, was tuned in together. They said also that the stones were
little more than nature's ultimate extension of man's feeble attempts
at radio communication.

Grant Russell knew little about that. What he did know was that those
stones were worth half a million dollars. He gathered up his patched
diving-suit and packed it, from long habit. He raised his head and saw
another eye watching him from the swamp. He watched the eye and
listened to the rasping of the bone-plates in the constrictor's
throat.

Ordinarily he would have tried to kill the big saurian, for its skin
had the property of turning slightly radioactive after death and it
was worth a couple of hundred dollars delivered in Aphrodite, but a
thought occurred to him. He watched the saurian and began to smile.
The constrictor could be worth a lot more than two hundred dollars to
him.

He flipped a handful of green sand at the eye in the swamp and it
withdrew abruptly into the water. He ran, making a wide circle around
the constrictor's powerful tail. He darted in to the head and stood
above the lidless eye. Three years ago he would not have walked this
close to a _dead_ constrictor, but now--well, he'd learned not to be
scared until there was need of it. He bent down. The fish was well
inside the saurian's mouth. The constrictor's jaws were distended and
it was helpless.

Grant whipped the bag of stones from inside of his jacket and tied the
leather thong to one leg of the fish. He made sure he had the one
single stone in his watch-pocket. That one he had to keep to be able
to find the others. He went back to the edge of the swamp and waited
until he saw an eye come up, whereupon he flipped another handful of
sand at it.

He stayed there for two hours, until the bag of