big eyes and smirking lips, fretted with red stubble. Mechanically he reached out a hand and helped the man down into the trench.

"Were you the one that winged him? That lousy spider would have gotten me sure. I didn't see him until he fell on me."

This then was the end. Hereafter he would give in to the mob, run with the hounds, die purposelessly like a lemming when the time came. Never again would he aspire to the darker, icy insight that gave life a real though horrible meaning. He was a ridiculous little communal animal in a lemming-horde racing across the galaxy, and he would live like one.

He saw the small black object falling swiftly through the mist. The stocky soldier did not. There was a deafening blast, that slapped the skin. Looking up he saw the stocky soldier still standing there. Without a head. As the body stumbled blindly forward, tripped and fell, he began to laugh in little hissing gusts through his teeth. His lips were drawn back, so that his jaw muscles twitched and pained him.

He felt contemptuous amusement at the blond soldier. The blond soldier had been to a third-rate nuclear technics school of some sort and believed it had been a serious mistake to put him in the infantry. Nevertheless the blond soldier was ambitious and took an unusual interest in the war.

They stood alone at the crest of a ridge thick with violet and yellow-spotted vines. In the valleys on either side, their units were pushing forward. Trails of dust and tracks of mashed vines extended as far as the eye could see. Various huge engines trompled forward, carrying men, and other men ran fussily about, freeing engines that had met with some stop or hindrance, as if the two were inextricably united in an unimaginable symbiosis. Small machines bearing messengers went swiftly to and fro like centaurs, a superior type of individual. Other machines spied watchfully overhead. It was like some vast, clumsy monster feeling its way; cautiously putting out pseudopods or horns like a snail's; withdrawing them puzzledly when they touched anything hurtful or strange; but always gathering itself for a new effort. It did not flow, but humped and hedged and scuttled. Like an army of Rigelian roaches. Or the driver ants of Earth that were so like miniature Martians, with their black-weaponed soldiers, foragers, scouts, butchers, pack-carriers.

And they were truly neither more nor less than ants. He was no more than an epidermal cell in a monster that was dueling with another monster, very careful of its inner organs but careless about its 

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