brightness of disbelief and impossibility coming into her eyes.

He kept moving in until the monstrous mutated gray thing was thoroughly dead. Until every separate tendril and patch was blasted to smoke. Then he lifted her broken body in his arms.

Tears fell on the opaqueness of his helmet. "I'm sorry, Pat," he choked. "I'm sorry it didn't happen sooner. I'm sorry I waited too long—but it isn't easy—to let yourself go insane."

Something was wrong. Pat! Pat! She seemed to be fading away from him, drifting away, melting into tattered veils of cloud. Her face became only two bright glad eyes, then they also melted together into a radiant pool. He toppled into the pool. He sank down, a wonderful lifelessness spreading through him.

He closed his eyes. Something was beginning to be very funny. In the thickening dark, he laughed a little. And in that laugh was a crazy, climbing note of—triumph.

He opened his eyes. He was laughing, in a kind of soft hysteria. He was on a couch. Not a dream couch, but just a plain hard bed. He sat up stiffly. Pain tingled down his legs. He saw Pat Nichols. And another. A man. He remembered him vaguely, one of the first who had escaped from the Cowl. His name—yes—he remembered now. Merrol.

Pat Nichols, alive, and smiling. Very beautiful too in a brief aerosilk bra and shorts and sandals. Her hair was a dark lovely cloud flowing down over bare shoulders.

"Hello, Greg," she said softly. "Welcome to—the Colonists."

"What?" He swung his legs around. "I don't understand. Not entirely."

Merrol, a gaunt elderly man, nodded from behind a desk. Merrol's hair was gray and sparse. Strange, seeing a man who showed age. Within the Cowls, one never grew physically old.

Pat said, "This is Ralph Merrol, Personnel Director of Venusian Colonization Enterprises."

Greg's numbness was filtering away beneath Pat's warm glad eyes. He raised his hand. The heat-blaster was still gripped in his fingers. It evidently hadn't been fired.

"It was all illusion," he said. "The scene in the cavern. It never happened?"

Merrol's care-lined face nodded. "It happened, but in your mind, Greg. We rescued you and Drakeson from the cannibal plant. We brought 

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