Kyla leaned close. Her words came, a fearful whisper, barely loud enough to hear: "Lift your helmet, blue man! Listen to the things the coleopteron tells--but carefully, lest its mind control should seize you...." Cautiously, Haral tilted back his battered copronium headpiece. It had rendered strange service in its day, that scarred old helm; but none stranger than this. For by some weird clash between its metal and certain electrocephalic wave-pulsations, it guarded his brain from the probing beetle minds, just as Kyla's bucket-like Ulnese heaume--designed for the purpose--guarded hers. Now, as Haral lifted the helmet, thought-vibrations washed in on him in throbbing waves: "Man-things, man-things! Find the man-things! Kill the man-things! Kill, kill, kill!" A new vibration slashed through, fiercely urgent: "Blood! Blood! Here! They came this way!" "Kill! Kill! Kill!" Already the coleoptera were surging forward. Antennae outthrust like lance-points, Q-rays probing, they combed the murky waste--each rise, each hollow. Their feet slithered through the rubble with sounds like the writhings of Venus' great snake-things in dry leaves. The acrid stink of their hate crept on the breeze in biting tendrils. * * * * * Haral cast a longing glance back towards his _hwalon_, still standing at bay amid the crags where they had lost it in their last swift, clashing contact with the beetles. But darting Q-rays hemmed in the dragon. And here and there between, a head, a leg, a thorax showed. Haral bit down hard. The coleoptera were hoping they could tempt him to try to regain the _hwalon_. For if he tried, he'd die in seconds. Kyla crept close against him. Her voice shook: "I've lost my way, Haral. Even if the beetles were to leave us, I'd not know how to go." For an aching moment Haral lay still. "I guessed as much," he said at last. "This running and fighting has pulled us from our path." "If we could only find one of the pylons of which the old books spoke--" "Yes. If." Grimly, the blue man fumbled the ray-pistol from his holster and shoved it into Kyla's hand. He gave no sign that he had even caught the tears, the desperation, creeping into her voice. "Here. Take this." "What--?" Haral held his voice flat, without emotion. "You'll need some weapon. The ray-gun will do as well as any." He settled the helmet more firmly on his head and took a new grip on his light-lance. "Come on!" Twisting, dragging the light-lance beside him, he wormed his way towards the nearest of the skeletal shafts that rose like gravestones over this dead city, last monuments to a civilization fallen into dust. Perhaps the shaft had been part of a building, once--a wall, a buttress, maybe. Now, pillar-like, it stood alone. Gaping holes showed through its mass. Great chunks of rock had fallen, here and there exposing the huge, corroding metal beams that were its core.