From below came a staggered flash, followed by jarring concussions. The pit was a manifold convulsion of movement. Fans of flame spurted upward, became fountains of light and uproar. Waves of sound and pressured air hurled Alston back from the curbing. With the last burst shot up quivering, ugly chunks of pulpy matter which clung and burned. Crawling masses of vegetation reached him, struck, broke in myriad struggling forms. Tentacles and tendrils of vine bore him down, overwhelming in their clinging embrace. His heat gun burned them through, loosening their grip. He broke clear. Something like a fiery whip flicked his face, drawing blood and shooting rivulets of pain through arms and legs. Vines licked out, enwrapped him, lashing, constricting. Steel-hard tentacles bound his arms to his body, crushing. From the surrounding dark came muffled explosions as spore-pods burst. A fine mist of searing dust powdered his face. Dust stung nostrils raw, burned into his eyes. Incredible sound shrieked from the pit. A cry of mortal agony. Vines and tentacles released suddenly. Alston staggered and slumped to the floor. Blind, tortured, gasping for breath, he dragged himself. Groping fingers found the curb and led him to the ramp. Crawling, he inched his way over its high-flung span, down. Upright again, he stood before the pedestal, climbed upon it, fingers numbed and bloody. His arms stretched upward toward the frightful thing upon the web. Blind, he did not see the swift blight overtake that lovely body. He did not see the rot which turned the softly molded limbs to dripping slime, the charnel droplets form and course down the blackened webbing. He did not see the sudden withering of vines and snake-trunked treeforms in the temple, the dark, ugly writhings of the stricken plant-things, the collapse and convulsive death of all the fearsome, unnatural legions outside. He did not hear the dry, crisp, rustling fall of dead, shrunken leaves throughout the forest. Blind and insensible, Alston stood upon the island pedestal in the ruined temple, arms yearning upward in hopeless supplication to the monstrous, decaying horror on the veil. He still stood there when a mopping-up squad of convicts searched the temple and found him. Raving, he was borne away to the returning ships. * * * * * It is another matter that he awakened later in the radiation hospital at Quanta City. Beautiful Kial Nasron, also suffering from painful radiation burns, sat beside him on the bed when he tore off the bandages and opened his eyes upon darkness. She pressed him gently back to the pillow, told him that he had been freely pardoned, and promised that he would see again, months later, when the paralysis had left his optic nerves. It is also another matter that when Kial and her father returned to Mars Craig Alston went along, and that a court there reversed its findings in his case, restoring full civil rights which a man needs to be married.