Then, abruptly, he collapsed. The green snake, now nearly ten feet long, whipped free and darted toward a drainage tunnel. Shouting men surrounded it, drawing rapid-fire pistols, but Captain Smith called out: "Don't waste your ammunition, men!" Startled faces looked up. And in that second of respite, the snake coiled and butted its flat-nosed head against the grating. In a shower of rust-flakes it fell outward, and the snake was gone like a streak of green fire. Tex heard Breska cursing in a low undertone. A sudden silence had fallen on the compound. Men fingered the broken grating, white-faced as they realized what it meant. There would be no metal for repairs until the relief column came. It was hard enough to bring bare necessities over the wild terrain. And air travel was impracticable due to the miles-thick clouds and magnetic vagaries. There would be no metal, no ammunition. Tex swore. "Reckon I'll never get used to those varmints, Captain. The rattlers back home was just kid's toys." "Simple enough, really." Captain Smith spoke absently, his gray eyes following the sag of the rusty netting below. "The green snakes, like the planarians, decrease evenly in size with starvation. They also have a vastly accelerated metabolism. When they get food, which happens to be blood, they simply shoot out to their normal size. An injected venom causes their victims to fight off help until the snake has fed." Breska snarled. "Cute trick the swamp men thought up, starving those things and then slipping them in on us through the drain pipes. They're so tiny you miss one, every once in a while." "And then you get that." Tex nodded toward the corpse. "I wonder who the war-chief is. I'd sure like to get a look at him." "Yes," said Captain Smith. "So would I." He turned to go, crawling below the parapet. You never knew what might come out of the fog at you, if you showed a target. The body was carried out to the incinerator as there was no ceremony about burials in this heat. A blob of white caught Tex's eye as a face strained upward, watching the officer through the rusty netting. Tex grunted. "There's your countryman, Breska. I'd say he isn't so sold on the idea of making Venus safe for colonists." "Oh, lay off him, Tex." Breska was strangled briefly by a fit of coughing. "He's just a kid, he's homesick, and he's got the wheezes, like me. This lowland air isn't good for us. But just wait till we knock sense into these white devils and settle the high plateaus." If he finished, Tex didn't hear him. The red-haired Westerner was staring stiffly upward, clawing for his gun. * * * * * He hadn't heard or seen a thing. And now the fog was full of thundering wings and shrill screams of triumph. Below the walls, where the ground-mist hung in stagnant whorls, a host of half-seen bodies crowded out of the wilderness into which no civilized man had ever gone.