darting eyes. The boy was shrewd, Caine thought, like a crazed animal. Fear had warped the already wayward brain, and to try to charge him or bully him or anything else would be like striking matches in a room full of explosives. He would have to wait, Caine decided, until he found a chance to trick the lightning-like senses of the boy.

Somehow, he would have to find a way to sweep the pistol out of the boy's nervous fingers. And Caine was thinking of this, working it back and forth in his brain, when they reached another circular clearing.

Yellow and green grass lay glistening in the morning dampness. Purple and red flowers dotted the thick carpet. A wall of vines and thick leaves bounded the clearing and the thin razor leaves extended here and there from the thick wall like polished rapiers.

Caine walked nearly to the center of the circle and then stopped suddenly.

He could see them, just behind the first thickness of foliage. The pale green skin and the globular heads and the large round eyes, lidless and soft-looking.

He turned back to the girl and the boy.

The boy waved the pistol. "Go on, damn you. Go on!"

Caine glanced back at the green-skinned creatures who waited in the green growth.

"I told you," the boy screamed, "you go on! Do you hear me?"

Caine held his hands at his sides, feeling his nerves tremble inside of him. It wasn't fear of the Venusians that made him tense. It was the boy with the pistol and the girl and the total of things.

They were in forbidden territory, trespassing on ground called sacred to the native people of this planet. Caine, who had worked so hard to help preserve the sanctity of these people's rights, had become now like the rest of the Colonists he had hated so much. He had brought the evil into the center of the Venusians' own private domain, and he was responsible.

"Did you hear me?" the boy screamed.

"Yes," Caine said, closing his fingers against his palms. "I heard you." He watched the muzzle of the gun. If the boy's eyes found the Venusians, he would pump the gun wildly at them and there would be death, and the impact of it could unbalance the whole structure of the relationship that already was leaning precariously.

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