not yet been in use. A tiny figure flapped against my face. Little Meeta. She gripped my shoulder, clung, and her tiny voice gasped in my ear.

"That weapon Curtmann has—the big molecule-melter—very long-range—the Forest City."

With a burst of numbing horror I understood it. This projector would cut the forest and the ground into a leprous molten swath, out to the Forest City itself.

I plummeted down, with Meeta still clinging desperately to my neck. Curtmann saw me coming. With a wild oath he dropped the projector and fired at me with a hand-flash. It missed. There was just a second when I leveled off, heading horizontally at him. The glare was on his sweat-bathed face, contorted with his lust; but I saw a look of despairing terror there as my flash drilled him and he fell as I swooped close over him.

We rose at last, high into the starlight. So pitifully few of us, gathering in a little broken, circling group. Beneath us now there was only a lurid red-yellow fire-pit of molten bubbling rocks where the forest glade had been. Then the heavy turgid smoke and gas-fumes settled upon it like a shroud.

Almost silently we struggled back through the starlight to the Forest City. Jim and Venta and little Meeta were here with me, but our little Midges were struggling to keep aloft. Dozens of them were clustering upon Jim and Venta and me. Their tiny, gasping voices were horrible. And we were the victors! It came to me then that surely whatever has been said and written of the futility of human killing, can never adequately picture it.

I think that is all I need recount. You have all heard how we returned to Earth, and the stir that my news brought. I should have been considered a charlatan perhaps, with my wild tale. But there was the spaceship; and Jim, Venta, and little Meeta. Scientists have inspected Venta now. It was an ordeal. But mostly they have been interested in Meeta.

That is passed. There are others on Venus like Venta, and others like our little Midge. We are living now on Earth, with Jim near us. Certainly neither here, nor on Venus, do we want any turmoil.

With Jim for my friend, and the adoration of little Meeta who thinks me in very truth, a God—and the love of my dear wife—certainly I am a mortal very singularly blessed.

 Prev. P 25/25