was half an hour before he actually overtook
the injured monster marching like a mad machine. Its mutilated
ducklike head held high, its colossal feet lifting one after the other
in a heavy, slowing waddle, and its hoarse screams re-echoing in a
senseless uproar of agony.

* * * * *

Tommy's hands were shaking, but his brain was cool with a vast
coolness. He raced past the shrieking monster, and halted in its path.
He saw Evelyn, a huddled bundle, clasped still to the creature's scaly
breast. And Tommy sent a burst of explosive bullets into a gigantic,
foot thick ankle-joint.

The monster toppled, and flung out its prehensile lizard claws in an
instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And
Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon
an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely
flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great
masses of flesh upheaved and fell away. Great gouts of awful smelling
fluid were flung out and blown to mist by the explosions. The thing
did not so much die as disintegrate under the storm of detonating
missiles.

Then Tommy went to Evelyn. He was wild with grief. He had no faintest
hope that she could still be living. But as he picked her up she
moaned softly, and when he cried her name she clung to him, pressing
close in an agony of thankfulness almost as devastating as her fear
had been.

It was minutes before either of them could think of anything other
than her safety and the fact that they were together again. But then
Tommy said, in a shaken effort to be himself again:

"I--I'd have done better if--if I'd had roller skates, maybe." His
grin was wholly unconvincing. "Why'd you get out of the Tube?"

"Its eyes!" Evelyn shuddered, her own eyes hidden against Tommy's
shoulder. "I saw them suddenly, looking at me. And I--hadn't any will.
I felt myself getting out of the Tube and walking toward it. It was
like the way a snake fascinates--hypnotizes--a bird...."

A vagrant wind-eddy submerged them in the foul reek of the dead
thing's flesh. Tommy stirred.

"Ugh! Let's get out of this. There'll be things coming to feed on that
carcass. They'll smell it."

Evelyn tried to stand, and succeeded. She clung to his hand.

"Do you think you can find the Tube again?"

Tommy was already thinking of that. He grimaced.

"Probably. Back-trail the damned thing. If the flashli