"Thank God, she's reviving!" Snap called at me and I joined them. Venza was stirring. Color was coming into her cheeks. Her lips were murmuring as though she were talking in her sleep. Then she opened her eyes. Her gaze fixed on us as we bent over her. "Why, what's the matter? Where are we? I thought we were in the tree-tops. Snap, don't look at me like that, dear. I'm all right--only confused." She could remember nothing since that gruesome thing bit into her arm, but the attack of its poison in her veins seemed definitely over. We sat with her, soothing her, explaining what had happened. And she was wholly rational. Her strength came back; her mind cleared. The brief red day came to its close. The sun plunged below the horizon; the stars winked into being. The red-purple Wandl night again was here. And now we saw that the whole firmament was swinging, the rotation made visible. The darkness leaped around us. Shadows filled the rock hollows. The caves and recesses of this rocky shore turned black with darkness. And in the sky now we saw another of those familiar opalescent beams. This was the one from Mars: we could identify the red disc of the planet. And then, from the mountains ahead of us but still below our horizon, the Wandl control station shot its attacking beam upward. Again there was that conflict in the sky. The axis of Mars was being altered, its rotation slowed. We could see now that we were much nearer than before to the control station. It seemed only about twenty miles ahead of us. The scream from it was deafening. The Wandl beam died presently. The electrical scream from the control station was stilled. The Earth's axis had been altered. Now Mars; and next would be Venus. A few more of these gravitational attacks and then the helpless planets, with rotation checked, would be towed away by Wandl, out into the deadly cold of interstellar space. Anita abruptly gave a startled outcry. The four of us, sitting in a group, had no time to rise. From behind a dark crag nearby, two figures appeared. The starlight showed them clearly. Molo and Wyk! They lunged forward at us. 14 We were unarmed. I had flung my weapon at the thing in the forest; and Snap had exhausted all his bolts firing at the multitude of green eyes. Molo and Wyk came with a dive through the air. Two tiny flashes leaped from them to the rocks behind them, and flung them forward. Snap and I seized Venza and Anita. It was a second of confusion; then I saw we would not be able to rise in time. The driving, oncoming figures were no more than twenty feet away. "Protect Venza, Snap! Get her behind you!"