appeared.

There was a colossal object with many pairs of legs moving back and forth over the little space where their food plants sprouted. In days, those plants would have yielded food. They wouldn't yield food now.

Their garden was being trampled to nothingness by a multilegged machine of a size comparable to the other machine which had chased them on the grid. It was fifty feet high from ground to top, and had a round, tanklike body all of twenty feet in diameter. Round projections at one end looked like eyes. It moved on multiple legs which trampled in orderly confusion. It stamped the growing plants to pulped green stuff in the polar sand. It went over and over and over the place where the food necessary for the humans' survival had promised to grow. It stamped and stamped: It destroyed all hope of food. And it destroyed all hope.

Because, as Stan drove the skid down to see the machine more clearly, it stopped in its stamping. It swung about to face him, with a curiously unmachinelike ferocity. As Stan veered, it turned also. When he sped on over it and beyond, it wheeled and came galloping with surprising speed after him.

Then they saw another machine. Two more. Three. They saw dark specks here and there in the polar wastes, every one a machine like the one which had tramped their food supply out of existence. And every one changed course to parallel and approach the skid's line of travel. If they landed, the machines would close in.

There was only so much power. The skid could not stay indefinitely aloft. And anywhere that they landed—

But they did land. They had to. It was a thousand miles away, on the dark side of the planet, in a waste of sand which looked frozen in the starlight. The instant the skid touched ground, Stan made a warning gesture and reached over to turn off Esther's suit-radio. He opened his own face-plate and almost gasped at the chill of the midnight air. With no clouds or water vapor to hinder it, the heat stored up by day was radiated out to the awful chill of interstellar space at a rate which brought below zero temperatures within hours of sundown. At the winter pole of the planet, the air itself must come close to turning liquid from the cold. But here, and now, Stan nodded in his helmet as Esther opened her face-plate.

"No radio," he told her. "They'll hardly be able to find us in several million square miles if we don't use radio. But now you get some sleep. We're going to have a busy 

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