ed for an instant in
the lee of a truck to light his pipe. There was a loud tinkle of glass,
and the windshield on the vehicle magically spouted a hole.

Gallifa ducked instinctively and only just in time. The windshield
spouted a second hole--and then a third. A faint, bluish flash located
his attacker. It was uncomfortably close.

Gallifa lashed out, and fell over a crouching figure. In a moment the
two men were thrashing in the mud. The unseen attacker was strong and he
fought like a maniac. But Gallifa was even stronger and his determined
anger quickly gave him the advantage. He wrested the pellet gun from the
other's grasp, and brought the butt down hard--brought it down twice.
The man slumped, and was still.

Gallifa snapped on his wrist torch and played the tiny, luminous glow
over the sprawled figure. The man who had tried to kill him was
Cummings. Gallifa numbly wiped the mud from his pipe and lit it with a
flickering lighter. The flame made a weird, cameo-like oval of his gaunt
face, with the olive-toned skin of his ancestry stretched tightly across
the high cheekbones.

Why? Bradshaw ... Samuels ... Cummings ...

A pattern was forming. And it was forming with a viciousness and a
regularity which left little doubt as to the probable outcome.

Did that pattern embrace the space ship with its ring of rain-washed
skeletons? Had they disintegrated under a pressure as relentless as the
swiftly-tightening jaws of a vise. _Something_ was forcing normal men
into homicidal insanity. But what?

Gallifa didn't know. But he did know that someone had better come up
with some answers--intelligent ones, and very much to the point. Or was
it already too late? Was the compound already infected--with each man
only waiting to be struck down?

Gallifa draped the limp body of Cummings over his shoulder, and sloshed
his way back to the hospital. The doctor grimly made room in the ward
room for the new patient. While he was treating the gash in Gallifa's
cheek, MacFarland, Hawkins, and some of the early-rising camp cooks
brought in two more men from the weather group.

Gallifa watched in tight-lipped silence as the corpsmen administered
hypos and set the new cots end to end in the already overcrowded
sickbay.

"There were only two restraint jackets," Dr. Thorndyke said jerkily.
"We'll have to secure the rest of them to the bunks."

MacFarland nodded. When he spoke, his voice was low and strained. "This
is getting out o