eck and tail, with ridges of scale on its
armored hide and a small serpentine head weaving back and forth among
the jungle growths.

* * * * *

Occasionally he had landed--always staying close to the space ship,
for Jupiter's gravity made movement a slow and laborious process, and
he didn't want to be caught too far from security. At such times he
might hear a crashing and splashing and see a reptilian head loom
gigantically at him through the fog. Then he would discharge the
deadly explosive gun which was Earth's latest weapon, and the creature
would crash to the ground. The chorus of hissings and bellowings would
increase as he hastened slowly and laboriously back to the ship,
indicating that other unseen monsters of the steamy jungle had flocked
to tear the dead giant to pieces and bolt it down.

Oh, Jupiter was a nice planet! mused Brand. A sweet place--if one
happened to be a two-hundred-foot snake or something!

He had always thought the entire globe was in that new, raw, marshy
state. But he had worked only in one comparatively small area of the
northern hemisphere; had never been within thirty thousand miles of
the red spot. What might lie in that ominous crimson patch, he could
not even guess. However, he reflected, he was soon to find out, though
he might never live to tell about it.

Shrugging his shoulders, he turned into the fifty story building in
which was his modest apartment. There he found, written by the
automatic stylus on his radio pad, the message: "Be with you at seven
o'clock. Best regards, and I hope you strangle. Dex Harlow."

* * * * *

Dex Harlow was a six-foot Senior Lieutenant who had been on many an
out-of-the-way exploratory trip. Like Brand he was just under thirty
and perpetually thirsting for the bizarre in life. He was a walking
document of planetary activity. He was still baked a brick red from a
trip to Mercury a year before: he had a scar on his forehead, the
result of jumping forty feet one day on the moon when he'd meant to
jump only twenty; he was minus a finger which had been irreparably
frost-bitten on Mars; and he had a crumpled nose that was the outcome
of a brush with a ten-foot bandit on Venus who'd tried to kill him for
his explosive gun and supply of glass, dyite-containing cartridges.

He clutched Brand's fingers in a bone-mangling grip, and threw his hat
into a far corner.

"You're a fine friend!"