monotonous, but continuous turned-down din.

Haynes listened.

"What the devil? We shouldn't get that kind of stuff on a frequency-modulation set!"

"We shouldn't. Something's making it. Maybe what I saw was—domesticated. In any case I'm going to go out and look for tracks at the place where I saw it moving."

"You? Not me? What's the matter with both of us?"

Wentworth shook his head.

"I'll take a flame-pistol, though running-shoes would be more appropriate. You can hover overhead, if you like. But don't try to be heroic, Haynes."

Haynes whistled.

"How about air reconnaissance first?" he demanded. "We can look for tracks with a telescope. If we see a jabberwock or something on that order, we can skip for the blue. If we don't find anything from the air, all right. But a preliminary scout from aloft would be wiser."

"That might be sensible," Wentworth admitted. "But the cussed thing scared me so that I've got to face it sooner or later. All right. Clear away this stuff and I'll take the ship up."

While Haynes slid the cups and platters into the refuse-disposal unit, he seated himself in the pilot's seat, turned off the watch-dog circuit that would have waked them if anything living had come within a hundred yards of the flier during the nighttime. Then he gave the jets a warming-up flow of fuel. Thirty seconds later, the flier lifted smoothly and leveled off to hover at four hundred feet. Wentworth took bearings on their landing-place. There were no other landmarks that would serve as guides for keeping the flier stationary.

The skit-trees began where the ground grew fairly level, and they went on beyond the horizon. They were clumps of thin and brittle stalks which rose straight up for eighty feet and then branched out and bore copious quantities of a fruit for which no human being could imagine any possible use.

Each clump of trees was a geometrically perfect circle sixty feet in diameter. There were always just ninety-two feet between clumps. They reached out in rows far beyond the limit of vision. Only the day before, the flier had covered fifteen hundred miles of westing without 

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