running figure. And men back in the glare at the end of the street; men shouting, and then running forward. The figure on the catwalk was Leh. He came plunging into the kiosk. Allen was bending over the fallen Garga. She was dying, with bloody foam gushing at her mouth. But she was trying to smile, her eyes staring at Allen. Contrition swept him. This Amazonian woman-warrior.... Trained to be a cruel machine. But she had remained only a woman; and she was dying now; just a woman staring with her last wistful gaze at the Earthman she loved so that she might take the image of him with her into the Great Beyond.

Allen murmured: "Oh, Garga, I'm sorry."

She may have heard him, but then her breath stopped, the light went out of her eyes and she was gone.

Allen jumped up as Leh gripped him. Leh, with his face and figure changed now so that Allen saw him as a handsome stripling, with something of the look of Nereid.

"Come on," Leh gasped. "Get that helmet off, and that heavy cloak. Hurry!"

A shot came from the catwalk, a spitting electronic stab that sent a shower of sparks on the kiosk ceiling. From the rail Allen and Leh dove. Then they were swimming; Leh guiding him as shots stabbed down at them. Allen was aware that Leh was dragging him underwater through a small subterranean passage to emerge in a watery cave. A water-cylinder was here, a twenty foot little submarine, as one might describe it on Earth. Two small seats were amidships in it, with its operating mechanisms around them. A moment later, they were off.

It was a weird underwater journey; some two hours, Allen guessed, while they sat in the dimness of the humming little cylindrical interior. Through the visor pane of the turret into which their heads projected, Allen had a dim vista of the turgid green-black depths, illumined by the small search-ray which preceded them. The vessel was propelled by a rocket-stream of disintegrating water as the electrolysis of backward gas-thrust shoved them forward.

Sub-sea world of Venus. Allen saw little of it then, but still enough to suggest its ramified weirdness. They sped out through the watery tunnel, down the inlet at a depth of perhaps fifty feet, and then into the open sea. Empty, black-green depths. Running at fifty feet submersion, Allen could see beneath them the vague vista of a slimy undulating bottom. Then it dropped away, with only occasional jagged spires of peaks. Tumbled, submarine world. Fishes flipped 

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