Aram knew that the antidote he had injected into their veins was not enough. Vaguely, he recalled that once--long ago, it seemed--he had been told that a small amount of specific would prevent physical damage. But the virus was claiming him, nonetheless. The pounding agony in his head was streaked with delirious phantasms. Kant Mikal's words echoed through his brain, though he no longer recognized them as other than his own. His screaming madness took the shape of those words as he lifted Deve in his arms and staggered out of the ship. Driven by some deep seated racial memory, he stumbled toward the sea--the mother--the giver of life. The sheer brutal agony of the virus increased with every step, blinding him with its intensity, until at last he could bear it no longer and sank to his knees on the white sand of a beach and pitched forward across the still form of the woman he carried, hands outstretched toward the shallows of a restless sea that laved him ... laved him.... * * * * * Deve stood nude in the glory of the morning sunlight and lifted her arms to the sky in an ecstacy of freedom. "How lovely it is," she murmured. The figure at her feet stirred and she touched him playfully with a bare foot. Aram woke, puzzled. Something, deep in the back of his mind troubled him. There had been something.... "Come swim with me!" Aram looked up at the naked girl before him. She was Deve. He knew that. He tried to remember more, but he could not. A strange shroud seemed to have covered up everything ... language he seemed to command, but.... He put the troublesome thoughts out of his mind and stripped off the strange coverings on his body. Hand in hand with Deve, he waded into the sea. They swam and played in the warm sunlight, and presently, tiring of their sport, sought the shade of a wooded glade. As they walked hand in hand among the flowering shrubs under the trees, Deve stopped abruptly. "Aram," she said, puzzled, "what is that?" An alien shape stood among the verdure, gleaming where the sunlight pierced the foliage. It was a long cylinder, tapered at both ends and lined with round, blank ports. They stood there staring at the spaceship with perplexed incomprehension. Both had a vague feeling that it was familiar. "What is it, Aram?" the girl asked again. "I ... don't know," he confessed. "I think we did know ... once," Deve said softly. "Aram, why are we here?" Why? The question touched off sparks of memory that brightened and as quickly faded. Aram spoke, painfully dredging the words from beyond the veil of forgetfulness. "We ... must ... save ... something ... from the ruins." "What ruins?" the girl asked impatiently. "What is it we must save?" But memory had faded. Aram could not answer her. Still she persisted with feminine curiosity unsatisfied. "Aram, what is this place?"