and rolled on two curious devices which were not caterpillar treads, but not exactly wheels, either. A loping, wildly excited horde of bipeds—including the one Borden had bandaged—surrounded it, making way for it but escorting it in wild enthusiasm.

The thing was caked with dirt. It was not merely dusty. It was packed with dried clay, as if it had been buried and only recently exhumed. A round blister at the front which might be plastic had been partly cleared of dirt, but there were still areas in which clay clung and made it opaque.

It curved about and swung parallel to the ship. It stopped within twenty feet of the air-lock. Then an oval window—which looked as if somebody had scratched caked clay off it with a stick—turned endwise, quite impossibly, and became a door. The door slid aside. The interior of the vehicle was dark.

Borden held his blaster ready. He wouldn't shoot first, but there had been a heat-ray flung at the Danaë!...

And Jerry got out of the incredible vehicle and stood blinking embarrassedly in the light from the outer-lock glare lamps.

Borden snapped, "Who's with you?"

"Why, nobody," said Jerry. "I tried to tell you by talkie, but it wouldn't work. I'm afraid Sattell did something to it before I left. It's dead."

"What's that thing?" demanded Borden. "That—that wagon?"

"It's a ground car, sir," Jerry said uncomfortably. "There are thirty or forty of them in a sort of valley about ten miles away. This one was half-buried in mud, and the others are the same or worse. The—er—creatures—took me there and dug this out for me. They apparently wanted us to have it."

"And it runs!" said Borden. There was again no sense to anything. A ground car buried in mud should not run when excavated.

"Yes, sir," said Jerry. "They dug it out for me, and I got in it and found the skeletons and the weapons."

Ellen said, "Skeletons?"

Borden said, "Weapons!"

"Yes, sir. I tried to ask you for advice over the talkie, and like I said, it wouldn't work, so I fiddled around a bit and the car showed signs of life, and I found out how to run it. So I brought it back. The weapons work too, sir. You point them at something and push a knob and 

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