Perhaps the din from within dulled his hearing. For tough naked hide scraped on rock and the heavy breathing of the wounded blind man should have been clearly audible otherwise. Masson must have heard him approaching at the last for he was half-turned when the rough fragment of grayish shale came thudding down. He twisted away from the weighty missile, but even so it grazed along his skull and he went down into the blackness of nothingness for a time. He awakened to look into the hot dark eyes of a Frog who had crept to within a few paces of his barricade. The rifle was yet in his grip and through blinding flashes of pain he somehow found the strength to aim and squeeze trigger. The ugly gray face vanished and he painfully fed another cartridge into the rifle's single chamber. The weight across his back did not go away, and twisting his head he saw that the blind Butrad's body had slumped across his own. Masson slid the weight off but the blackness came again; so he rested for a time. And this time the blackness had come to stay for it was night. The sun had finally been swallowed by the cloud layers that swath Venus eternally. He tried to crawl back toward the tunnel, but how he was to climb the sheer wall to the escape passage he did not know. He could not raise his body from the ground on the level. Once again the pain in his head returned and pain flashed its lightning. His eyes clenched themselves shut and he fought off the giddy waves of weakness. After a time he could feel again, and see. There was light in the cave, light and the grayish flabby-hided bodies of Butrads. He tried to raise the rifle and a webbed hand knocked it from his grasp. "None of that, now," a voice ordered, and his unbelieving ears recognized that of Joe Dolan. Rifles cracked at the cave entrance and he saw the larger young ones of the Butrads being hoisted up to the escape tunnel. And he grinned weakly up at Dolan's hideous scarred face. The future of the Earthmen on the Watery World was safe now.