air. Then the explosion, and he had vanished. He never
finished his leap. It was annihilation.

How many more of them there were I don't know. But this must have been
too much for them. They used a final round of shells on us, all of which
exploded harmlessly, and shortly after I heard them swishing and
crashing away from us through the tree tops. Not one of them descended
to earth.

Now I had time to give some attention to my companion. She was, I found,
a girl, and not a boy. Despite her bulky appearance, due to the peculiar
belt strapped around her body high up under the arms, she was very
slender, and very pretty.

There was a stream not far away, from which I brought water and bathed
her face and wound.

Apparently the mystery of these long leaps, the monkey-like ability to
jump from bough to bough, and of the bodies that floated gently down
instead of falling, lay in the belt. The thing was some sort of
anti-gravity belt that almost balanced the weight of the wearer, thereby
tremendously multiplying the propulsive power of the leg muscles, and
the lifting power of the arms.

When the girl came to, she regarded me as curiously as I did her, and
promptly began to quiz me. Her accent and intonation puzzled me a lot,
but nevertheless we were able to understand each other fairly well,
except for certain words and phrases. I explained what had happened
while she lay unconscious, and she thanked me simply for saving her
life.

"You are a strange exchange," she said, eying my clothing quizzically.
Evidently she found it mirth provoking by contrast with her own neatly
efficient garb. "Don't you understand what I mean by 'exchange?' I mean
ah--let me see--a stranger, somebody from some other gang. What gang do
you belong to?" (She pronounced it "gan," with only a suspicion of a
nasal sound.)

I laughed. "I'm not a gangster," I said. But she evidently did not
understand this word. "I don't belong to any gang," I explained, "and
never did. Does everybody belong to a gang nowadays?"

"Naturally," she said, frowning. "If you don't belong to a gang, where
and how do you live? Why have you not found and joined a gang? How do
you eat? Where do you get your clothing?"

"I've been eating wild game for the past two weeks," I explained, "and
this clothing I--er--ah--." I paused, wondering how I could explain that
it must be many hundred years old.

In the end I saw I would have to tell my story as well as I could,
pieci