was only turgid windy darkness. I must have muttered something to Nereid; my arm went around her as we turned to run back to our boat in the cove. Too late! From the palm woods behind us a violet beam of light stabbed out. It caught us; bathed us. There was a guttural shout; the sound of a little pop and something whizzing with a whining hum through the air. I felt something strike my legs. A little blob which with its impact abruptly uncoiled, and then coiled again as it wrapped itself around my legs so that I crashed heavily to earth face down.

And another had hit my neck. Ghastly thing—quivering steel spring. It felt like that; thin quivering metal encircling my throat. Almost like a thing alive, gripping me with its metal fingers ... strangling me. I was aware that Nereid, too, had fallen. My groping fingers clutched at the strangling band; its sharp edges cut my fingers as futilely I tried to tear it loose. I recall that I lay threshing, lunging, with my legs pinned and my breath gone. Dark figures were standing over me now. Guttural chuckling voices mingled with the roaring torrent of Niagara in my ears. Then the dancing spots before my bulging eyes blurred the gathering dark shapes.

III

The roaring in my ears came first as my consciousness struggled back. My fumbling fingers felt my throat. The band was gone; the skin was swollen there. Then I knew that I was bathed in the cold sweat of weakness and was lying on the metal grid of a floor. The murmur of voices sounded around me; and I opened my eyes to find myself in a dimly starlit, circular turret room. The control room of a spaceship. It hummed with a throbbing rhythm of its current. But save for that it was queerly still, vibrationless.

We were in space. Through the round, transparent turret walls I could see the blazing stars in a black firmament to one side. The other was shrouded with metal blinds, through the chinks of which dazzling sunlight was showing, so that I knew we had already left the giant cone of the Earth's shadow. Heading partly toward the Sun. Heading for Venus? It seemed so.

Men were here around me. Huge, burly, strangely garbed men—one at the controls, where banks of levers and dials with quivering indicators were ranged in rows with a line of little fluorescent globes diagonally across them. Two other men sat softly talking together; guttural, unintelligible words. Weird figures indeed. At first glance they could have been towering robots; wide, square shoulders, rectangular bodies, round tubular, jointed legs. The starlight glinted 

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