nearest to the jungle, went out to find a number of sheets of metal lying in his field. They were obviously of the same material which had been used in the space ships. Stranger still, they were of the exact sizes to build the corncrib as Arthur Roberts had imagined it.

Most of the colonists took this as evidence of the good intentions of their unseen hosts, but it only served to increase the uneasiness of the council.

Two days later, they were quickly summoned by Jean-Paul Monet. Without offering an explanation, he insisted that they again mount their horses and ride toward the jungle. As they neared the giant wall of green, they heard a strange thumping noise ahead of them and once more pressed Monet for answers.

"You will soon see," he said grimly. "For two days, I have stayed in the fields watching for the secret to the metal. Now, you will see what I witnessed early this morning."

A few minutes later, the men reined their horses to a stop and stared into the jungle, scarcely believing what they saw.

Near the outer edge of lush, living green, there was a huge vine. Its creepers, almost a foot thick and covered with cup-shaped thick leaves, seemed to enter the ground at intervals and then reappear to grow along the top. But the Earth men soon realized that the creepers were moving, as though growing at a tremendous rate. And each time one of the scarlet cup-shaped leaves appeared out of the ground it dumped a greenish lump of something on the ground. On looking closer, they saw that the ground here was covered with the broad flat leaves of some other plant.

Towering above this scene were a number of orange-leafed trees like those which had surrounded the field where the space ships first landed. As they watched, the green limbs of these trees swayed and bent until the huge green pods were directly over the lumps cast up out of the ground. Then, from what they had thought were seed pods, came a gush of white fire, striking the lumps. Under that direct fire, so strong that the horses shied from the heat a hundreds yards away, the lumps took on a fire of their own.

From the edge of the jungle there grew long stalks with what had seemed to be large square flowers on them. But, as the men watched, the stalks whipped forward and the flowers descended upon the heated lumps. It was this which was producing the thumping noise they'd heard, and each blow from the square flowers was helping to pound the lumps into sheets of 

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