wo graters and the elements of a pocket radio. The
smell ceased. The faint flashes of light stopped. There was no longer
a raucous sound.

He turned off the ion producing device. The symptoms returned. He
turned it on and off. He took a step forward. He tested again. The
cloud of ions from the innumerable jagged points was invisible, but
somehow it refracted or reflected--in any case, neutralized--the
weapon of the beings at Boulder Lake. He went on and presently he felt
the very faintest possible tingling of his skin and heard the barest
whisper of a sound, and smelled the jungle reek as something so
diluted that he was hardly sure he smelled it.

He went on, and those faint sensations ceased. Presently, impatient of
his own timorousness, he turned the device off again. He had walked
through the terror beam.

He started back with the device turned on once more and at the point
where he'd felt the beam's manifestations faintly, he stopped to savor
his now seemingly useless triumph. If the monsters had a detonating
beam this meant nothing. Yet it could have meant everything. He paid
close attention and distinctly but weakly experienced the effect of
the terror beam.

Then he didn't. Not at all. The sensations were cut off.

He heard Jill cry out shrilly. He plunged toward the place where he
had left her. He raced. He leaped. Once he fell, and frantically swore
at the wet stuff that had caused him to slip. He reached the tree
stump and Jill was not there. He saw the saucer-sized tracks her feet
had made on the saturated fallen leaves. They led toward the road.

He heard a car door slam and a motor roar. He plunged onward more
desperately than before.

The motor raced away. And Lockley got out on the highway only in time
to see the rear of a brown-painted, military-marked car some three
hundred yards away. It swept around a curve of the highway and was
gone. It was going through the space where the road was blocked by a
terror beam, headed obviously for Boulder Lake.

What had happened was self-evident. From her place beside the huge
stump she'd seen a military car approaching. And she and Lockley had
been trying to reach the cordon of troops around Boulder Lake. There
was no reason to distrust men in uniform or in a military car. She'd
run to flag it down. She had. By a coincidence, it was undoubtedly
where a carload of collaborating humans would have stopped to have the
road-blocking beam cut off by their monst