At its base, or at the base of one impossibly machine-smooth wall, there was a semi-circular mark, as if someone had carelessly strewn dirt across the olive-hued turf. The grains and clods of this dirt resolved themselves, as the jets whined on down, into a twinkling, tumbling cluster of ants--with gnats hovering and darting. Then they became something larger. Greene turned to shout excitedly at Pritchard, but at that instant Sturgis's voice cracked from the two-way mike Pritchard had hung above him. "Hey, chief, aren't those some of that girl's animals?" "Right," barked Pritchard. "That's a big rumpus down there. Follow me on down for a look. Then I think we'll try a couple of passes." "Passes? At what?" "Those are Miss Boyce's 'people', all right. They're fighting." There was no further chance to talk. Pritchard and Sturgis gripped their separate toggles almost simultaneously and their jets roared into life, feeding power to their dives for a pull-out. The ground-contact alarm chattered its warning that they were coming too close. As soon as the jets took hold, the pilots leaned back, pushing hard against the rudder bars. The tail elevators lifted into the slipstream, and the two silver beetles howled through a long pendulum swing that flung them far off into the sky. But the trained eyes aboard them had ticked off the essential details of the amazing battle being waged through the tall grass toward the mountain. "Holy rockets!" came from the blond head in front of Pritchard. "That's a regular battle line they're holding. Did you see those babies fighting!" "Hey, chief," cracked Sturgis, "What goes on down there, anyway? Who's fighting whom? Or what's fighting which?" Pritchard trimmed off into level flight before answering. "As far as I can make out, Cornelia Boyce's people are under attack, but I can't figure out who's doing the attacking. They're trying to hold that defense arc, but they're being snowed under. They're catching it from the air as well as on the ground. I recognize the animals inside that line. They're her people, all right. But I can't make out the attackers." He banked the cruiser around toward that now miles-distant little spine of mountain. Sturgis's ship followed him around as if fastened by a wire. "They looked like reptiles and big insects." "That's what they looked like to me. I don't remember seeing any of them yesterday--except for that bad dream I tried to shoot away from McManus." "Anyway, there's sure a mob of them," cut in Sturgis. "The water all around that island is alive with them." "That kid was right about one thing," said Pritchard. "There's a much higher level of intelligence here than you'd find in Terran animals, for instance. But never mind that now. Listen, boys, this is a planned and directed attack. And we're going to buy ourselves a stack of chips and sit in on the game. But, first, did anybody see the girl?" "No," cracked the mike, and Greene shook his head.