Red, growing things unrooted. Coming monstrously to do that for which during all their growth they had been trained. There seemed thousands of them. Over every distant slope they came closing in upon the city. Thick red vines a hundred feet long. Others grown into a tangled clump, every separate tendril of which was in slimy movement. A red boll, like the bulging trunk of a tree. It rolled, leaped. Another of a flat, round central growth, with prickling spines like huge needles standing erect, and waving, groping tentacles. It hitched itself along, awkwardly. They came from everywhere. Red, gleaming monsters of the ground, advancing with a grim, uncanny silence, closing in upon the city. Leela watched, with the blood freezing in her veins. Within the city no alarm had sounded. The woman in the park played with her little girl. But the baby at the other woman's breast was crying. . . . The first of the red things reached the city wall. Slithered up like some monstrous red ivy growing there. A thing of dangling green pods from which a slimy juice was dripping. A segment of it raised high over the wall, with green eyes staring down. In a near-by street a headless, friendly animal gave out its imbecilic cry. The two women in the park looked and saw, and screamed. . . . The red thing rose and slithered over the wall. Stretched its length down a street; then encircled a house, its wide-flung segments slithering into every door and window. Screams from in there sounded over the silent, starlit city. Shrill, throat-tearing screams of women . . . and the piping, terrified cries of children. . . . The alarm spread. The cries were caught up, echoed from everywhere about the city. Women and girl children were rushing in a panic from the houses. . . . Over the wall at its every point, the red things were climbing . . . spreading over the city . . . filling the streets . . . climbing with a red, leafy growth into houses . . . green peering eyes, searching everywhere. . . . One of the flat, round growths with prickling spines--needles each as long as a human body--lurched itself into the park. With a sudden spring it caught a running woman. Its tentacles tossed her aloft. She fell, impaled upon its swordlike spines. Its tentacles pulled an arm from her body . . . tossed the arm away. . . . The woman was still screaming--horribly. . . . Leela, sickened, covered her face with her hands. She heard Rokk's gloating voice, "You see--my solution? Look, little white woman! Make your heart stout, like Rokk's. This is the law of life. Some live, some die. We--you and I--will live, for love, when this blood-red day is over." Day! The dawn had come. The red sun rose from the horizon in its low arc. Red, staining everything.