* * * * * Three streams of fire converged in a ball of flame on the twin red spires. They disappeared in the rippling, booming fire. "Hold it!" Pritchard shut off his flamer and the others followed suit. Holding the nozzle before him, he walked to the place where the things had been. There was nothing there, except a hole where the tangled grass had been disturbed, and a kind of pit in the ground, into which loose dirt was still dribbling. He backed a step and turned the flamer on, playing fire into the pit and around it. Then he shut it off. "You fool," came the girl's voice at his elbow. "You damned fool. You just won't believe me, will you?" Pritchard lifted his gaze toward what had once been Cadet Greene. Richard Harrison Greene, a rollicking lad from the Cumberland Gap. Thomas Guilfoyle McManus, a man with a red-haired soul. McManus, first, and, now, Greene. The hunter's face was turned to stone. "Keep your eyes peeled," he said harshly to the others and stalked off to the place where the squirt of liquid had landed after missing Sturgis. Some thirty feet from where it had been ejected, there was no grass but a four-foot smear where the ground bubbled and frothed. The stench hovering over this spot was incredible, even to the man who had encountered it before. He turned to confront Cornelia who had followed him. "I don't know whether I can get it through your thick head or not," she bit out, "you've simply got to get out of here. You can't--" "Get this through _your_ thick head, Miss Boyce," said Pritchard between clenched teeth. "This thing, whatever it is, has killed two of my men. I'm quite ready to believe it is intelligent, possibly the most intelligent organism on this planet. But it's a killer just the same and we're going to kill it. None of your idealistic theories are going to stop us, either." She stared at him, beginning to shake her head a little wildly. "You can't kill it! That's what I'm trying to tell you. It can't be k--" There was a sudden crash. Cornelia whirled and screamed. The three men and the girl stood transfixed. Over by the river one of the jet cruisers was on its side, resting on a crumpled wing. The other was forty feet in the air, and rising, held in the coil of an impossible red monstrosity rearing its long wet self into the sky. It was a worm, a very long, thin worm at least a hundred feet long, not counting what remained underground. It towered some fifty feet into the air, about thirty-five feet more of it wrapped around the cruiser. At its tip two fifteen-feet-long feelers writhed and wriggled, as if still smarting from the scorching they had received. The coil slipped a little. The cruiser, looking more than ever like a beetle at this moment, slid slowly out and fell. And again it crashed into the cruiser on the ground and rolled ponderously off it.