to Dival. "We may as well--"

There was a sudden commotion from outside the ship. Startled shouts
rang through the hollow hull, and a confused medley of excited thoughts
came pouring in.

With one accord the four of us dashed to the exit, Dival and I in the
lead. At the door we paused, following the stricken gaze of the men
grouped in a rigid knot just outside.

Some, forty feet away was the edge of the forest that hemmed us in. A
forest that now was lashing and writhing as though in the grip of some
terrible hurricane, trunks bending and whipping, long branches writhing,
curling, lashing out--

"Two of the men, sir!" shouted a non-commissioned officer of the landing
crew, as we appeared in the doorway. In his excitement he forgot his
menore, and resorted to the infinitely slower but more natural speech.
"Some sort of insect came buzzing down--like an Earth bee, but larger.
One of the men slapped it, and jumped aside, forgetting the low gravity
here. He shot into the air, and another of the men made a grab for him.
They both went sailing, and the trees--_look!_"

But I had already spotted the two men. The trees had them in their grip,
long tentacles curled around them, a dozen of the great willow-like
growths apparently fighting for possession of the prizes. And all
around, far out of reach, the trees of the forest were swaying
restlessly, their long, pendulous branches, like tentacles, lashing out
hungrily.

"The rays, sir!" snapped the thought from Dival, like a flash of
lightning. "Concentrate the beams--strike at the trunks--"

"Right!" My orders emanated on the heels of the thought more quickly
than one word could have been uttered. The six men who operated the
disintegrator rays were stung out of their startled immobility, and the
soft hum of the atomatic power generators deepened.

"Strike at the trunks of the trees! Beams narrowed to minimum! Action at
will!"

The invisible rays swept long gashes into the forest as the trainers
squatted behind their sights, directing the long, gleaming tubes.
Branches crashed to the ground, suddenly motionless. Thick brown dust
dropped heavily. A trunk, shortened by six inches or so, dropped into
its stub and fell with a prolonged sound of rending wood. The trees
against which it had fallen tugged angrily at their trapped tentacles.

One of the men rolled free, staggered to his feet, and came lurching
towards us. Trunk after trunk dropped onto its severed stub and f