Rounded shapes in myriads were emerging.
Plants--mushroom growths--poured up from the earth to drink in the
sunshine of their brief summer. They burst the earth to show
unfolding leaves or blunted, rounding heads, that grew before the
men's incredulous eyes.

Winslow was the first to recover from the stupefying beauty of the
spectacle.

"The machine!" he gasped. "Back to the ship! We'll be swamped,
overwhelmed...." He rushed madly back down the slope.

* * * * *

Jerry was beside him, a revulsion of feeling driving him to frantic
efforts. The piercing beauty that had enthralled him has become a
thing of terror. The soft, pulpy, growing things that crushed beneath
his feet were a menace in their lust for life.

They were a mile and more from the machine. Could they ever find it,
Jerry wondered. The whole landscape was changed; bare rocks were
half-hidden now under clinging, creeping vines. Only the sun remained
as a guide. They must go toward the sun and a little north.

He followed Winslow, who was circling a huge area of weird growths
that already were waist high. They leaped across a gaping chasm and
fought their way over a low hill, rank with vegetation, only to be
confronted by a maze of great stalks--stalks that sprouted as they
watched, dismayed, and threw out grotesque and awkward branches.

They made one futile effort to force their way, but the trunks, though
pliant, were unyielding. To attempt to find their way through the
labyrinth was folly.

"We've got to keep on trying," said Jerry Foster. "We've got to get
back, or...."

Winslow, as the look in his eyes showed, needed no ending to that
sentence. There was the summer of a lunar day ahead; the inventor did
not need to be told of the scorching, broiling heat that would wither
the land when the sun struck from straight overhead. And in their ship
was food and water and a means of transport to the cooler heights
above.

* * * * *

It was Jerry who took charge of the situation. Here was a prodigious
laboratory in which Winslow's science was useless, but in fighting
with nature--even nature in as weird and terrifying a mood as
this--Jerry felt himself not entirely incompetent.

He looked about him. It had been but an hour since they watched the
first onslaught of this life that engulfed them. And now they were cut
off. Through an opening, where bare rocks made a rift in the
vegetatio