covering his black Tellurian eyes. The cold light from the captured still-living Shnug-fly which dangled from the low raftered ceiling molded a weird shadow on the walls of the tiny hut. Joha's red eyes blazed brighter, brighter still. Her slightly webbed hands gripped together with a tremendous tension of mental effort.

Owen Baarslag screamed. He sat up with a sudden heaving motion of agonized fear. His eyes were wide and horror-filled as he stared at the half breed creature beside him. Sweat streamed from his face made pallid by five years in the sunless swamp. His hands trembled over his bearded jaw.

"Stith!" he choked harshly. "Get me Stith, quickly!" He raised an arm to strike her, but she weaved away. She brought him a box of the Stith tablets crystallized from the fermented juices of the Venusian aukweed. He tremblingly swallowed three of them. He got to his feet and stood there, shuddering, eyes wild with the memory of the terror-dream.

He stared at her for a long time from fear-glazed eyes while the fear gradually died into clouds of suspicion. He suspected her ability to probe his mind during sleep and implant the seeds of nightmare there, she knew that. But it was only an intangible suspicion. He needed her. She was his only companionship in the vast global rain-forest of Venus. And he wouldn't let the suspicion grow to the stage where he would have to kill her or worse. Her hold over him was a strong one. If he lost her, he would be alone.

To the Tellurian colonists scattered minutely through the rich area of Sector 5, Owen Baarslag was an unspeakable obscenity. A degenerate derelict; an abnormal who had "gone native" and things even more despicable. A Stith addict who eeked out a precarious existence in the most polluted occupation known: that of forcing the timid Venusian swamp natives to harvest the meager crops of aukweed from the lake bottoms. The vile drug brought fabulous credits when Baarslag managed to get it into the hands of secret agents on the space liners that docked at the Vencity spaceport twice a year.

And the Venusians themselves hated Baarslag with a helpless cowed fear. He beat, tortured and killed them whenever they refused to obey. And the necessity of probing the great depths of the lakes after the aukweed twisted and deformed those it didn't kill, dooming them to a life of incurable pain.

Shaking as with dohl-fever, Owen staggered to the door, peering through the insect-proof netting into the writhing tendrils coming up from the 

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