hook his unsymmetrical body, and all the nerve and
colossal will-power that had carried him for six months, suddenly
flowed out of him in a single wave and left him empty. He forgot about
the ordeal that still lay ahead. He forgot everything. He pitched
forward on his face in the sand, and slept.

Some hours later a whistling noise awoke him. He rolled over, awake
instantly, for in past months his ears had saved his life as often as
had his eyes. High in the sky he picked out a cannibal fish from the
Acid Sea. It had set its great wings in a dive.

He raised his heat-gun, fired once, saw the feathers burst into blue
flame, saw it falling; then he rolled over and went back to sleep. Not
even the thud of its heavy body on the sand disturbed him, but an hour
later he heard another warning--a rasping sound--and through the
stench of the ancient swamp he smelled a fetidness that meant danger.

This time as he turned he rolled to his feet. He saw the huge coils of
the Venusian water-constrictor. One lidless phosphorescent eye gleamed
evilly at him, but its great jaws were spread and the dead fish was
half-way down its bone-plated throat.

Grant Russell relaxed. Ordinarily he would have been scared to death
to be within miles of the big saurian. But now for a few hours, with
the fish in its throat it would be comparatively harmless.

Grant rubbed his eyes and stretched. How wonderful sleep could be! For
six weeks he had been in the swamp where he never had dared to take
off his diving-suit even when he was resting on a clump of floating
grass, for fear it would suddenly sink and drop him into a hundred
feet of brown water; six weeks walking through mud sometimes over his
head, with the brown, infested water above that; six weeks pitting all
his swamp lore against sudden death in a thousand forms, with only the
light gravity of Venus to aid him, and his indomitable determination
to keep him going. But now he felt like a million.

No man had ever crossed the Great Swamp alone on foot before. Few had
crossed it in any fashion. Few would have tried it but Grant Russell
because few wanted to do it as much as he did. In spite of his small
size and his scrawny muscles, in spite of Venus which catered to big
men and strong men, he had done it.

* * * * *

The food problem alone would have stopped most men, but Grant had
spent a lot of time around the swamps of Venus. Often he had gone
prospectin