Jerry felt as if he'd rammed his hand into an open wood fire. He tried to scream; nothing emerged between his jaws except that futile tongue-stump. The jellyfish, climbing in a leisurely fashion down the limb it was ingesting, flicked out a tentacle and began doing something horrible to Jerry's upper right eye. It sent waves of pain into his mind, and almost blotted out all thought, except for a maniac notion that urged Jerry to laugh at the creature's ambition. For its highly maneuverable tentacle-tip was diligently attempting to _unscrew_ the eye. Jerry's right arm was gone. Tentacles flipped and floundered all about his head-section. The digestive cavity of the jellyfish was widening, trying to take in Jerry's head at a single swallow. He saw, with the five usable eyes remaining, a crystally concavity, the sides glinting with digestive fluid tinted beautiful emerald by the foliage out beyond its semi-transparent body. Then the thing closed over his head, and the last of the eyes began to sear and sting. Jerry's mind cried out in anguish ... and lightning flashed across his consciousness. White, silent lightning. Pain ceased. The time of Contact had passed. III Captain Daniel Peters paced agitatedly back and forth before the couch holding that still figure in its bulky helmet. The last glow of the sunset had vanished behind the trees around the clearing minutes before. Peters took three puffs from a just-ignited cigarette, then crushed the white cylinder under his heel. "Sir?" said a man at the airlock of the ship. Peters looked up swiftly, and identified the speaker as the technician for the Contact mechanism. "How's it going?" he asked, trying to keep his voice matter-of-fact. "First report's just come in," said the man, with a brief smile. "Information's being coded onto a new card for the roborocket index. I guess Norcriss came through the Contact all right. His life-pulse still shows on the panel. It was flickering badly for a few minutes, though. Think I should terminate?" Peters hesitated, then shook his head. "No, I guess not. They tell me there are no after-effects to even a hazardous Contact. Norcriss'll be wanting to get on with it ... poor devil," he added, with a wry smile that touched only his lips, didn't reach his eyes. "Proceed, seaman." The other man nodded, and vanished within the ship.... IV Vast flat fields of sun-bronzed stone stretched in all direction to the horizon, pockmarked with rimless craters, seething with red liquid which flickered with dusty blue fingers of fire here and there on its surface. Every so often a pale plume of steamy white rose toward the coppery overturned bowl that was the sky. Cautiously Jerry sniffed the air. Sulphur. That was the red liquid burning in those many pits: Yellow sulphur melted into gluey scarlet pools amid the nearly invisible shimmer of its consuming fires.