Grant snapped off the light as clouds of flying things arose. He started down the neck of dry land and walked all night, going as far as he could without submerging, getting out of range of the holocaust around the dead constrictor. Eventually he came to a lavawood tree. He examined it carefully, then climbed it. He found a crotch in the limbs. He lay down and hung his arms and legs over the limbs, pulled the shield over him, and went to sleep.

From the brilliant, blinding light of the sun even through the clouds, and the vapor arising from the surface of the swamp, he knew it was mid-afternoon when he awoke. He started up, but long habit stopped him almost as soon as he moved. He opened his eyes and was fully awake, listening for the sound that had awakened him. He heard it, a rasping noise like the sound of a knife-blade scraped against the grain of a fresh hog-skin. He looked across the swamp. Less than fifty yards away was Relegar, walking toward him on the water. The sound came from the scraping of his gray poison-mandibles against each other.

Relegar’s mouth, as wide as his body, was open. The two bulbous eyes gleamed like pieces of polished metal. They saw Grant. The spider’s sixteen jointed legs, that held his purple body three feet above the water, moved too fast for Grant to follow them. The Uranian skittered across a hundred feet of water and walked out on the land.

His bone-scraping voice came to Grant in the tree. “I’ll take the stones now.” It was a sinister voice. Grant felt a crawling, instinctive horror as the spider came toward him, its jointed legs moving delicately. “You’ve saved me some trouble by finding them.”

Grant overcame his paralysis and reached for the heat-gun. Relegar saw the motion and stopped. “You can’t hurt me with that heat-projector,” he said. “You might shoot off a leg, but I’d have you half eaten before you could fire a second bolt.”