terrific, taxing all his enormous driving power, for he at
that time was without doubt more exhausted than they. But he
succeeded, and he was a haggard-faced, feverish shell of himself when
at last he had them in a dangling drunken halt in the air a hundred
feet from the surface.

Primal savagery lay stretched out below, and there seemed to be no safe
spot whereon to land. The foul, deep swamp that reached for miles on
every side, the towering trees that sprouted their spiny trunks and
limbs from it, the interlaced razor-edged vines and creeper-growths--all
was a stirring welter of tropic life, life varied and voracious and
untamed. From the tiny poisonous bansi insects layers deep on the
nearest tree to the monster gantor that crouched in a clump of weeds,
gently sawing his fangs back and forth, all the creatures of this world
were against man.

Carse scanned the scene wearily. They had to land; had to sleep under
normal conditions, and eat and drink, before they could go further.
But where? Where was haven? He snapped out the direction rod, moved
away a short distance, and then glimpsed, below and to the left, a
small peninsula of firm soil which seemed safe and uninhabited. And
there was a pool of fairly clear water before it, containing nothing
but an old uprooted stump. He came back to the others, shook them, and
led them down to the place he had discovered.

They landed with a thump which seemed to shake all life from two of
them. Friday and Eliot Leithgow collapsed into inert heaps, asleep
immediately. Carse extracted a ray-gun from the belt of Leithgow's
suit and prepared to stand watch. But that was too much. He
over-estimated his capacity. He had come through thirty hours of
hellish sleep-denied delirium, and he could not stave sleep off any
longer. He staggered and went down, and his eyelids were glued in
sleep when his body hit the ground.

But mechanically, with an instinct that sleep could not deny, his left
hand kept clasped around the butt of the ray-gun....

* * * * *

Satellite III's day has an average of seven hours' duration, her night
of six. It was perhaps the last hour of daylight when the three metal
and fabric-clad figures lying outsprawled on the little thumb-shaped
piece of soil had landed. Now quickly the huge sweeping rim of Jupiter
plunged down, and night fell over the land.

Fierce darkness. Jungle and swamp awoke with their scale of savage
life. Sw