he asked interestedly.

"Y-yes...."

"Fine!" said Tommy, and grinned again. "When you feel scared again,
ring me on the phone and I'll give you another treatment."

But her smile faded as, beaming at her, he crawled into the first
section of the Tube. And his own expression grew serious enough when
she could see him no longer. The situation was not comfortable. Evelyn
intended to marry him and he had to keep her cheerful, but he wished
she were well away from here.

He tried to move cautiously through the Tube, but his bundles bumped
and rattled. It seemed hours before he was climbing up the last
section into the tree-fern jungle. He was caution itself as he peered
over the edge. It was already night upon Earth, but here the
monstrous, dull-red sun was barely sinking. It moved slowly along the
horizon as it dipped, but presently a gray cast come over the
colorings in the forest. Flying things came clattering homeward
through the masses of fern-fronds overhead. He saw a projectile-like
thing with a lizard's head and jaws go darting through an incredibly
small opening. It seemed to have no wings at all. But then, in one
instant, a vast wing-surface flashed out, made a single gigantic
flap--and the thing was a projectile again, darting through a
_cheraux-de-frise_ of interlaced fronds without a sign of wings to
support it.

* * * * *

Tommy inspected his surroundings with an infinite care. As the
darkness deepened he meditatively taped a flashlight below the barrel
of the sub-machine gun. Turned on, it would cast a pitiless light upon
his target, and the sights would be silhouetted against the thing to
be killed. He hung his grenades in a handy row just inside the mouth
of the Tube and set his gas bombs conveniently in place, then settled
down to watch.

It was assuredly necessary. Von Holtz's story confirmed his own and
Denham's guesses and made their worst fears seem optimistic. Von Holtz
had made a Tube for Jacaro, working from the model of Tommy's own
construction. It had been completed nearly a month before. But no
jungle odors had seeped through that other Tube on its completion. It
opened in a sub-cellar of a structure in the Golden City itself, the
city of towers and soaring spires Denham had glimpsed long months
before. By sheer fortune it opened upon a rarely used storeroom where
improbable small animals--the equivalent of rats--played obscenely in
the light of ever-glowi