in a burst of fear. "The gun, Greg! The heat-blaster—quick—"

Greg leaned forward, staring in rigid fascination. Fleshy stocks swayed toward him. Other mouths opened, petal mouths. Gigantic floral traps, and cannibal blooms.

"Greg! Greg!" Drakeson was framed now by that great cannibal maw.

Greg had the heat-blaster up. He had it leveled. But he couldn't depress the firing stud.

"Drake! I can't! I can't!"

How could any integrated man be deliberately destructive? How could any sane person—kill?

"I can't—Drake—" The awful conflict seemed to rip through his body. He felt the sweat, hot and profuse, rolling down his face. He concentrated on that gun, on his finger, on the firing stud.

The cannibal blossom was closing. Sticky juices dripped over Drakeson. He was screaming. Greg's finger lifted. He could not fire.

The Codes said no destruction. No killing. The Codes had been established after the great Chain disaster. Violence begets violence, the Codes said. And once begun, it was accumulative, like the snowball rolling down hill.

Greg sagged. His knees buckled. He sprawled out in the slippery muck. Tendrils swished softly and hungrily around him. He heard a shout. He tried to twist his head. Figures blurred before his eyes, and he heard the deadly chehowwwwww of a terrific blast.

The last thing he remembered before the dark wrapped him up softly and warmly, was the cannibal plant exploding in a million fragments of stringy tissue, and Drakeson falling free.

I didn't fire, he was thinking. Someone else saved Drakeson. But I think I might have done it. My finger—it was moving—bending—or was it? No. I couldn't have been destructive. Couldn't have killed.

Consciousness came back to Greg. Painfully. It came back slowly and it took a long time. He lifted his eyelids. He raised himself to a sitting position. He stared down a gloomy, phosphorescent corridor. It was obviously subterranean. It was damp, chill. Cold luciferin light glowed from lichen on walls and low ragged ceiling.

It was long and it finally curved, he decided. But he could look back into a long slow curve of corridor and ahead into 

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