His eyes turned glassy suddenly. He tried twice to raise himself but he fell back each time. He did not speak at all. Blood from his punctured lungs flooded up into his mouth, and with a terrible, convulsive trembling of his entire body he rolled over on his side and lay still. Corriston's hands began to sweat beneath the hard, cold gun. He wanted to drop the weapon, to hurl it from him, but he couldn't somehow. He had killed Saddler in immediate self-defense. This had been a little different--a new experience, a frightening experience and he had been forced to grit his teeth even in firing, and now that it was all over he was tormented inwardly in a way that left him badly shaken. Henley was gone now. Dead and still and forever removed from a world he had contaminated. Henley had been warped and twisted largely by circumstances outside himself; nevertheless a deadly reptile has to be crushed when it is about to strike. Corriston looked up from the limp form sprawled out on the floor, and for a moment the tight lines of his face relaxed a little. Henley was no longer a menace; the breath of life that had sustained him had expired so completely that he had become now a kind of hollow mockery of something monstrous and distorted that could never harm anyone again. It was Ramsey who had to be considered now, Ramsey who was in peril. The light in the room seemed somehow a little dimmer than it had been. He turned slowly back to Ramsey, and for a moment could not quite believe what he saw. Ramsey's face was changing. The hollows beneath his cheekbones were deeper than they had been, and his mouth had gone completely slack, and his eyes were uprolled in a quite ghastly way, so that only the whites showed. Slowly as Corriston stared Ramsey's features began to come apart. The familiar, hideous pattern began to repeat itself on Ramsey's blanched features. The mouth widened until it turned into a shapeless, colorless gash in a face that was hardly recognizable. The nose widened and spread out, the chin receded, and the cheeks became a flattened expanse of wrinkled flesh that stubbornly refused to stop spreading. Ramsey's face became a pumpkin face, with slits for eyes and a hideous caricature of a mouth that seemed almost to pout as it expanded. Suddenly Ramsey was no longer sitting upright before the desk. His body swayed and began to slump, tilting at first only a little sideways and then sliding completely from the chair to the floor. Ramsey did not descend to the floor with violence. It was a slow, barely perceptible gliding motion of his entire body that carried him from an upright position to a prone one in less than thirty seconds. His body seemed to collapse inward upon itself, as if he had suddenly become too skeleton-thin for his clothes, as if so much vitality had been drained from him by the shot which had put an end to his life that he had given up all hope of maintaining his dignity in death.