Jay tucked the tiny wrist expoder into his soggy trunks' waistband. "Not interested," he told her. "You better go back to your cabin and get another expoder. I'm keeping this one." "No," Ina Haan's voice cut across the hostility of the tiny chamber laconically. "Give." Jay shook his head. "I'm keeping it. And you better get another for Onin Tufor. I think we're about to have trouble." As though to emphasize his words a prolonged ghastly shriek came from the fog. They heard broken shouted phrases, human words but with something bestial and terrible in their anguished pleading. The screams rose higher and higher--and choked off until almost inaudible. The women's faces were pinched and terrified. They pressed close to Jay, forgetting that he was a man-made creature--a robot of living flesh--in their instinctive urge for the protection of the male. "That was Zee Fivotu," he said soberly. "The Frogs have him. Probably tore him apart...." "We'll be next," said Ina Haan, her voice thinned. "Guard the lock, Ina," ordered Jay. "I'm going back after the animats. We'll need them all." Ina Haan made no protest to Jay's assumption of authority nor did he think it strange that he should take control. From somewhere in his acquired memories he had dredged up adequate knowledge of the butrads' methods of attack. He raced back through the corridor to the animat cabin. Onin was grinning, his long bony face alight. "I've found how to remove the helmets," he cried, "by inserting a small rod that locks the lever resting against the skull. We...." "No time for that now," he told the animat, paying no heed to the battered control case Onin held gingerly in his long fingers. "The Frogs are attacking!" * * * * * They sprawled atop the wreckage of what had been the _Sun Maiden_, their puny expoders sending their explosive needles at the blurred shapes that crept out of the fog's pall. Down below the two women guarded the airlock with the two other expoders, and with them waited the club-armed animats. "Y'know, Onin," Jay said, touching the button that sent a short burst into the butrads crawling closer, "I'm beginning to believe that we're not animats." The lanky animat gulped. "Huh? You think we're human?" "Sounds reasonable. Your knowledge of the control case--of which I'd know little or nothing. And I know about the butrads, all their little strategies. Even Venus seems familiar." "But we don't know our own names. Just numbers. I'll confess I know little about Venus or its fauna. But I remember Blake City on Mars. I can describe the laboratories of the university." Jay stitched a burst of needles across a trio of the grotesque froglike natives. Two flattened where they lay to move not again and the third raced for the fog's shield.