thought in a frozenness that it would be very hard to describe the engines down there; they were too foreign, the eye saw them but the mind wasn't yet prepared to register—

"They heard us! They are coming!"

Grushenko said it almost exultantly. Holbrook and Levine whirled about. Half a dozen forms were moving at a trot up the slope, directly toward the humans. Holbrook had a lurching impression of creatures dressed in black, with purplish faces muffled by some kind of respirator snout, two legs, two arms, but much too long and thin. He remembered the goblins of his childhood, in a lost Maine forest, and a primitive terror took him.

He fought it down just as Grushenko stepped out of concealment. "Friends!" cried Grushenko. He raised both hands. "Friends!" The sun gleamed on his bare head.

An alien raised a tube. Something like a fist struck Holbrook. He went to his knees. A small hot crater smoked not two meters from him. Grushenko staggered back, shooting. One of the aliens went on its unhuman face. They deployed, still running to the attack. Another explosion outraged the earth; fire crawled up a tree trunk. And another. "Let's go!" yelled Holbrook.

He saw Levine fall. The little man stared surprised at the cooked remnant of a leg. Holbrook made a grab for him. A gray face turned up. "No," said Levine. He cradled his rifle and thumbed it to full automatic. "No heroics, please. Get the hell back to camp. I'll hold 'em."

He began to shoot. Grushenko snatched at Holbrook's wrist. Both men pounded down the farther hillside. The snarl of the Terrestrial rifle and the boom of the alien blast-guns followed them. Through the racket, for a second as he ran, Holbrook heard Levine's voice into the walky-talky mike: "Four of 'em left. A few more coming out of the spaceships. I see three in green clothes. The weapons seem ... oh, Sarah, help me, the pain ... packaged energy ... a super-dielectric maybe."

CHAPTER II

The officers of the Rurik sat at a long rough table, under trees whose rustling was not quite like that of any trees on Earth. They looked toward Holbrook and Grushenko, and they listened.

"So we got the jet aloft," finished Holbrook. "We, uh, took a long route home—didn't see any, uh, pursuit—" He swore at himself and sat down. "That's all, I guess."

Captain Svenstrup stroked his red 

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