s last hope, fading
away.

He pushed in among thick, leafy stems. A voice hailed him:

"Hah!"

And a figure, blacker than the gloom, tramped close to him across a
little grassy clearing.

"You! They drive you out?" a thick, unsure voice accosted him.

Parr hefted his club, wondering if this would be an enemy. "Yes. They
drove me out. I'm exiled from among exiles."

"Uh." The other seemed perplexed over these words, as though they stated
a situation too complicated. Parr's eyes, growing used to the darkness,
saw that this was a grotesque, shaggy form, one of the degenerate
outcasts from the village. "Uh," repeated his interrogator. "You come to
us. Make one more in camp. Come."

* * * * *

Among tall trees, thickly grown, lay a throng of sleepers. Parr's
companion led him there, and made an awkward gesture.

"You lie down. You sleep. Tomorrow--boss talk. Uh!"

So saying, the beast-man curled up at the root of a tree. Parr sat down
with his back against another trunk, the club across his knees, but he
did not sleep.

This, plainly enough, was the outcast horde. It clung together, the
gregariousness of humanity not yet winnowed out by degeneration. It had
a ruler, too--"Tomorrow boss talk." Talk of what? In what fashion?

Thus Parr meditated during the long, moonless night. He also took time
to examine once more his captured armor. Its metal plates, clamped upon
a garment of leatheroid, covered his body and limbs, even the backs of
his hands, as well as his neck and scalp. Yet, as he had decided before,
it was no great protection against violence. As clothing it was
superfluous on this tropical planetoid. What then?

He could not see, but he could feel. His fingers quested all over one
plate, probing and tapping. The plate was hollow--in reality, two
saucer-shaped plates with their concave faces together. They gave off a
muffled clink of hollowness when he tapped them. When he shook the
armor, there was something extra in the sound, and that impelled him to
hold a plate close to his ear. He heard a soft, rhythmic whirr of
machinery.

"There's a vibration in this stuff," he summed up in his mind. "What
for? To protect against what?"

Then, suddenly, he had it.

The greatest menace of the whole tiny world was the force that reversed
evolution--the vibration must be designed to neutralize that force!

"I'm immune!" cried Fitzhugh Parr aloud; and, in the early dawn that now