ge.
Lockley clamped his lips tight shut to waste no breath in speech. The
arrival and the circling of the plane had been a public notice that
there were fugitives here. If the beam could paralyze a pilot in
mid-air, it could be aimed at fugitives on the ground.... There could
be no faintest hope....

Wholly desperate, Lockley helped Jill down a hillside and into a
valley leading still farther down.

He smelled jungle, and muskiness, and decay, and flowers, and every
conceivable discordant odor. Flashes of insane colorings formed
themselves in his eyes. He heard the chaotic uproar which meant that
his auditory nerves, like the nerves in his eyes and nostrils and
skin, were stimulated to violent activity, reporting every kind of
message they could possibly report all at once.

He groaned. He tried to find a hiding-place for Jill so that if or
when the invaders searched for her, they would not find her. But he
expected his muscles to knot in spasm and cramp before he could
accomplish anything.

They didn't. The smell lessened gradually. The meaningless flashings
of preposterous color grew faint. The horrible uproar his auditory
nerves reported, ceased. He and Jill had been at the mercy of the
unseen operator of the terror beam. Perhaps the beam had grazed them,
by accident. Or it could have been weakened....

It was very puzzling.

CHAPTER 5

When darkness fell, Lockley and Jill were many miles away from the
clearing where he had made the S.O.S. They were under a dense screen
of leaves from a monster tree whose roots rose above ground at the
foot of its enormous trunk. They formed a shelter of sorts against
observation from a distance. Lockley had spotted a fallen tree far
gone with wood-rot. He broke pieces of the punky stuff with his
fingers. Then he realized that without a pot the bracken shoots he'd
gathered could not be cooked. They had to be boiled or not cooked at
all.

"We'll call it a salad," he told Jill, "minus vinegar and oil and
garlic, and eat what we can."

She'd been pale with exhaustion before the sun sank, but he hadn't
dared let her rest more than was absolutely necessary. Once he'd
offered to carry her for a while, but she'd refused. Now she sat
drearily in the shelter of the roots, resting.

"We might try for news," he suggested.

She made an exhausted gesture of assent. He turned on the tiny radio
and tuned it in. There was no scarcity of news, now. A few days past,
news went