He was--though of course he didn't know it--deep in the Matto Grosso of South America. Everywhere he looked, violent flares of color peeped at him through the twisted, swaying vines that clung everywhere. Nature had run riot in the jungle. No subtleties of shading or form here. Long, sharp leaves gleamed greenly on all sides of the biochemist. Radiant reds glowed from the shadowy depths of forest beyond the small clearing. Golden streamers hung in profusion from each crooked elbow of the chaotically twisted tree branches all about him. Despite the brilliance and beauty of it, Jorik sensed a hidden menace in the place. He should, at that spot, have been hearing shrieking, roaring, bleating, grunting of animals, the cries of birds and skittering of insects. There was nothing but that all-pervading silence. Jorik moved slowly away from the skimmer and approached the nearest tree, his scientist's eye pondering something not-quite-right-looking about it. As he got to it, and touched it, the thick, corrugated bark fell into powder between his fingers. He pressed, pried, thumped and tugged at the tree. It was dead. Dead and rotting. His heart fluttered annoyingly in his breast. There was something frightening about the way things were going. He could understand a war destroying human life, even civilization, but this--this was primeval territory. The beasts, the plants, the lower forms of life--these should have survived. But they hadn't. Suddenly afraid, he rushed back to his skimmer, slid into the cockpit and took off, rising at a swift vertical angle from the dead jungle. Toward the eastern coast of South America, he saw many fine hotels, with magnificent curves of beaches following the perimeter of the land mass on which the people had lived--already he was thinking of them in the past tense--and Jorik wondered at the absence of the blue O-C-E-A-N that should have bordered those beaches. But as he glided outward from the coast, curving steadily northward toward New York, he saw that the beaches, with their pale silver sands, extended outward and downward toward only more land, soon becoming rocky, then turning at last into mud and ooze, with a sprinkling of blackish-green weeds. But no visible trace of the mysterious O-C-E-A-N. * * * * * Gwann, searching throughout Africa, fared no better. Only the silence, the rotting vegetation, and the absence of landlocked life. Higher in the atmosphere of the ghost planet, he saw many of the carnivores, but also smaller animals, soaring in gloriously colored groups, and seemingly harmless. There were times when he had to pass through literal clouds of these smaller beasts, whizzing and bobbing and gliding past him by the millions, only to vanish in the hazy distance with a blaze of color. Africa having proven fruitless, Gwann directed the skimmer toward the opposite polar region from that which Drog was to investigate.