limbs. Their slate gray skin, covered with fine golden down, blended easily with the ocher moss of the forest.

"Something is wrong," Alston told her finally. "These people are badly frightened. They're leaving the forest and heading west into unknown country. I don't understand it, and Tuluk is vague about the actual danger. He's warning us to leave at once. And Tuluk doesn't scare easily, so it must be something out of the ordinary."

The leader glanced apprehensively about as he talked, his voice rising and falling in the birdlike cadences of his speech. Alston gestured toward the wrecked ship, then the girl, shook his head in negation, and shrugged eloquently. Gesticulating, chirping wildly, the native chief rounded up his followers and melted swiftly into the shadowed gloom of the forest.

"What was that all about?" asked Kial uneasily.

Alston snorted. "I still don't know. I explained that we could not go in the ship. He wanted us to come with him. I told him that was equally impossible, that you wouldn't last ten miles the way they travel. Don't worry about it. There's danger, but we knew that. Besides, these natives don't always make sense. They've different mental processes from ours. Not quite human. What scared them might mean nothing to us. Volcano, earthquake, food shortage. They're superstitious, too. Maybe a god growled at them.""What are we going to do?" Alston grinned. "Hole up. I know where I am now. I hoped to get guide service, but we won't need it. Tuluk told me how to get where we're going. I spotted the place a while back on one of my survey trips. Seems like a good place to hide for a while. I have a cache of supplies there. Three hours of rough going, though. One hour, Tuluk said, but that means three for us. Messy job, pawing through this muck."

Alston climbed into the trees and rummaged in the shattered 'copter for usable equipment. His total find amounted to a pair of radilume flashbeams, some tablets of food concentrate, water in a self-cooling canteen and his heat gun. He scrambled back to the ground and struck out boldly through the jungle.

It was Kial Nasron's first experience of Venusian forest. She wondered how Alston could keep his directions at all. To her it was a vast nightmare, staggering, impressive, but without order or definite form. Here was nothing of the cultivated parklands of Earth. Titanic trees towered upward and lost themselves in gloom, their knotted trunks like the columns of a giant's temple. Overhead was a blank mass 

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