"Max," Ritchie said, "you're nuts. Tell you what: at exactly 12:01 I'll take you out for the biggest, juiciest, rarest steak you ever saw. On me. Then we'll get loaded and fall all over ourselves laughing—"

Ritchie fought away the sudden picture of steak, rare steak, with the blood sputtering out, sizzling on an electric stove.

The clock began to strike. Henry Ritchie and Max Kaplan stood very still.

He uncoiled. The dry pop of hardened joints jabbed wakefulness into him until finally the twenty-foot long shell lay straight upon the steaming rocks. He opened his eyes, all of them, one by one.

Across the bubbling pools, far away, past the white stone geysers, he could see them coming. Many of them, swiftly, giant slithering things with many arms and many legs.

He tried to move, but rock grew over him and he could not move. By looking around he could see the cliff's edge, and he remembered the thousand bottomless pits below. Gradually the rest formed, and he remembered all.

He turned to the largest creature. "Did you tell them?" He knew this would be a horrible punishment, worse than the last, the burning, far worse. Fingers began to unhinge the thick shell, peel it from him, leaving the viscous white tenderness bare to the heat and pain. "Tell them, make them understand, this is only a dream I'm having—"

They took the prisoner to the precipice, lingered a moment to give him a view of the dizziness and the sucking things far below. Then nervous hands pressed him forward into space.

He did not wake for a long time.

 Prev. P 7/7