SIX FRIGHTENED MEN

You put your life on the line when you join the Exploratory Wing of theSpace Corps. They tell you that when you sign up. The way they told itto me, it went like this:

"You'll be out there on alien worlds where no human being has everset foot—worlds which may or may not have been inhabited by hostilealien creatures. You take your life in your hands every time you make aplanetfall out there. Still interested?"

"That's old stuff," I said. "You don't think I'd join up if it was anold ladies' tea party, do you?"

Which was how I happened to be crouching behind afantastically-sculptured spiralling rock out on the yellow wind-blasteddesert of Pollux V, huddling there with the fierce sweep of sandagainst my faceplate, looking at the monster that barred my path.

The thing was at least sixty feet tall and all eyes and mouth.The mouth yawned, showing yellow daggers a foot long. As for theeyes—well, they burned with the cold luminosity of an intelligent andinimical being.

I didn't know what the thing was. One minute I'd been examining aninteresting rock formation, a second later I was hiding behind it,watching the ravening thing that had appeared out of nowhere.

Other members of the expedition were sprawled here and there on thedesert too. I could see Max Feld, our paleontologist, curled in a tightplump little ball under an outcropping of weathered limestone, andthere was Roy Laurence, the biochemist, flat on his stomach peering atthe thing incredulously.

Back behind me were three others—Don Forster, Leo Mickens, ClydeHamner. That made six. The two remaining members of the team, MedicHoward Graves and Anthropologist Lyman Donaldson, were back at theship. We always left a shift of two back there in case of trouble.

And trouble had sure struck now!

I saw Laurence swivel in the sand and stare goggle-eyed at me. Hislips moved, and over my helmet radio came: "What the hell is it, Phil?Where'd it come from?"

I'm a morphologist; I'm supposed to know things like that. But I couldonly shrug and say, "A thing like that could only come from the pits ofHell. I've never seen anything like it before."

I hadn't. We had been fine-combing the broad windswept plain in frontof the ship, looking for archaeological remains. The planet wasuninhabited, or so we thought after running a quick check—but Max Feldhad discovered relics of a dead race, an exciting find, and we had allfanned out to help him in his search for more.

We had been heading toward a flat mountain wall that rose abruptly fromthe desert about a mile from the ship when—from nowhere—the creatureappeared, towering above the desert like a dinosaur dropped from theskies.

But no dinosaur ever looked like this one. Sixty feet high, its skin aloathsome gray-green quivering jelly with thick hairy cilia projecting,its vat-like mouth gaping toothily, its cold, hard eyes flicking backand forth, searching for us as we flattened ourselves out of sight, itwas an utterly ghastly being. Evolution had gone wild on this planet.

And we were cut off from the ship, hemmed between the mountain wall andthe creature.

"What are we going to do?" Clyde Hamner whispered. "He's going to smellus out pretty soon."

As he spoke, the monster began to move—flowi