matter, Alston too. Rotten bad luck that he chose such a time for his break, and the girl got in his way. I doubt if he'd have harmed her deliberately. The man was desperate, bitter, even crazy angry, but he's no natural killer. It was just his way of hitting back at you. Making you sweat a little."

Torkeg Nasron smiled sardonically and sadly, musing to himself that no man ever beats the game. The price of a six-year-old treachery had finally caught up with him and he was paying in the biggest coin he owned.

In Castarona, three fast VE survey ships were being hastily armed. Files of convict volunteers ceased work to watch a squadron of six battleships lift from their cradles and head for the remote fastnesses of the Tihar in ragged, irregular formation. Within minutes, a flight of G-class rocket scouts blasted off to follow the cumbersome battlewagons.

Signals shrilled. Convicts who had volunteered for the suicide squads went aboard and waited. Blinker lights winked on and off in color codes. At the last moment, Hailard and Nasron climbed into the pilot's quarters, with new bulletins and final calculations from the detectors locating the trouble center. It should not take long for the suicide command to overtake and pass the heavily armored military aircraft. Within two hours, three at the most if headwinds were strong, or if storms were encountered over the forest, the ships should reach the target area.

Field sirens moaned and the jets let go with a staggered roar. 

Deep within the city, before an oval pierced through an immense wall of squared and jointed megaliths, Alston paused. Huddled close beside him, like a dog or a terrified child, the girl drew comfort from the man's physical nearness.

Kial Nasron could not afterwards remember how they had come to the place. There was confused impression of moving through a labyrinth of endless, winding, dark avenues. The ruddy glare made but a feeble glimmering upon monstrous colonnades or touched with vague mystery the hideous reliefs carved upon titanic walls. Above, towered the bulking mass of a shattered citadel. On either hand, sheer as the cliffsides of a narrow canyon, walls rose in terraced setbacks to the gloomy arch of the sky. Everywhere was mute, colossal evidence of alien evolutions, and everywhere the rank, bloated growth of unnatural vegetation.

Guarding the portal were gigantic effigies in stone of gods vanished and forgotten when the universe was 

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