Owen grasped Joha's slim arm, spun her around. His mouth twisted with cruel pleasure as he saw the slight painful writhing of her lips. "You may begin your slow death from loneliness now, Joha. I'm leaving for Vencity tonight." She looked sadly resigned as she came close to him, slid one hand up and into the thick matting of his hair. "You need rest, Owen. You were out there two days in the swamp getting that last three kihn of aukweed without sleep. You should rest well before you go into danger. You only slept an hour." He lay down with a long sigh. "Yes. That is a good idea. I'll need all my powers when I go to Vencity. But those--those horrible nightmares." His face drained, oozing sudden sweat at the memory. "Always the nightmare. The same one. But each time I dream, the nightmare gets more horrible! There must be some cause for it. If I could only find its cause. As soon as I assume Albert's identity, perhaps I can use the psychiatric scanner on myself and find the basic cause." But her cool fingers stroking his brow sent him back into the sleep he dreaded. Immediately her hands withdrew. "No, Owen, the psychiatric scanner will never find the cause of this nightmare. It's artificially endowed, Owen, dear. It has no roots in your twisted childhood, or in your cruelty. And the scanner could never find its source. Because I am its source, and I am alien." Her hands drew back from his face. Her eyes pierced brighter, brighter, eating down, down into the dregs, the dreary twisted depths of his mind. * * * * * He was running, running as before, always as before. But this time his pursuers were very near. He was running in a sticky bog. With infinitely slow agony he drew each foot out of the slimy muck, sat it down, drew up the other foot. Around him was a thick blanket of cold clammy fog. And he knew it was an endless fog--that if he ran forever he could never escape it. But he also knew he wouldn't run forever, or even very long. His pursuers were too close. His pursuers! He looked back. A sense of profound horror sickened him. He recognized them now. For the first time they were near enough for him to identify them. He sank down on his knees. He began to crawl through the stinking ooze. Then he felt their nearness. They were surrounding him. He couldn't escape. He saw a ring of cold green faces. Hands, innumerable hands, reached out, tickling him with a branch of small blue nettles. [Illustration: _They had caught up with him at last!_] He screamed. The poison fangs of the bombi-vine. The final agonies of the damned. The bombi-vine! Death would be infinitely preferable to the sting of the bombi-vine. It was unendurable pain, indefinitely prolonged. It directly effected a mysterious distortion in the nervous structure. Science had no cure, had never found the cause. Men who stumbled onto the nettles of the bombi-vine sought a quick and merciful death as the only escape.