Joan's eyes were shining. "I don't care what they're composed of, Richard. We've got to capture one of those creatures alive." I shook my head. "Impossible, Joan. If the air outside wasn't poisonous I'd be out there with a net. But there are limits to what we can hope to accomplish on this trip." "We've siphoned up specimens of the soil," Joan protested. "What's to stop us from trying to catch up one of them in a suction cup?" "You're forgetting that suction cups have a diameter of scarcely nine inches," I said. "These creatures may be as huge as the dragonflies of the Carboniferous Age." "Richard, we'll project a traveling suction cup through one of the vacuum locks and try to--" Her teeth came together with a little click. Startled, I turned and stared at her. Despite her elation she had been sitting in a relaxed attitude, with her back to the control panel and her latex taped legs extended out over the dais. Now she was sitting up straight, her face deathly pale in the cube-light. The creatures were standing a little to the right of the rigidly staring crewmen, their swiftly vibrating wings enveloped in a pale bluish radiance which swirled upward toward the ribbed metal ceiling of the pilot chamber. [Illustration: _The creature was standing, wings swiftly vibrating, enveloped in a pale, bluish radiance._] Enormous they were--and unutterably terrifying with their great, many-faceted eyes fastened in brooding malignance upon us. Joan and I arose simultaneously, drawn to our feet by a horror such as we had never known. A sense of sickening unreality gripped me, so that I could neither move nor cry out. Dawson alone remained articulate. He raised his arm and pointed, his voice a shrill bleat. "Look out, sir! Look out! There's another one coming through the wall directly behind you." The warning came too late. As I swung toward the quartz port I saw Joan's arm go out, her body quiver. Towering above her was a third gigantic shape, the tip of its abdomen resting on her shoulders, its spindly legs spread out over the pilot dais. As I stared at it aghast it shifted its bulk, and a darkly gleaming object that looked like a shrunken bean-pod emerged from between Joan's shoulder blades. Joan moaned and sagged on the dais, her hands going to her throat. Instantly the wasp swooped over me, its abdomen descending. For an awful instant I could see only a blurred shapelessness hovering over me. Then a white-hot shaft of pain lanced through me and the blur receded. But I was unable to get up. I was unable to move or think clearly. My limbs seemed weighted. I couldn't get up or help Joan or even roll over. My head was bursting and my spine was a board. I must have tried to summon help, for I seem to remember Dawson sobbing: "I'm paralyzed too, sir," just before my senses left me and I slumped unconscious on the dais.