He felt the bag at his side. The stones didn’t weigh much, perhaps a couple of ounces apiece, but the famous telepathic stones of Venus were well known on Earth. Wealthy young lovers would carry a pair, if they could get them, so that each could know what the other was thinking.

Scientists said the stones were matched crystals so that each pair, in effect, was tuned in together. They said also that the stones were little more than nature’s ultimate extension of man’s feeble attempts at radio communication.

Grant Russell knew little about that. What he did know was that those stones were worth half a million dollars. He gathered up his patched diving-suit and packed it, from long habit. He raised his head and saw another eye watching him from the swamp. He watched the eye and listened to the rasping of the bone-plates in the constrictor’s throat.

Ordinarily he would have tried to kill the big saurian, for its skin had the property of turning slightly radioactive after death and it was worth a couple of hundred dollars delivered in Aphrodite, but a thought occurred to him. He watched the saurian and began to smile. The constrictor could be worth a lot more than two hundred dollars to him.

He flipped a handful of green sand at the eye in the swamp and it withdrew abruptly into the water. He ran, making a wide circle around the constrictor’s powerful tail. He darted in to the head and stood above the lidless eye. Three years ago he would not have walked this close to a dead constrictor, but now⁠—well, he’d learned not to be scared until there was need of it. He bent down. The fish was well inside the saurian’s mouth. The constrictor’s jaws were distended and it was helpless.

Grant whipped the bag of stones from inside of his jacket and tied the leather thong to one leg of the fish. He made sure he had the one single stone in his watch-pocket. That one he had to keep to be able to find the others. He went back to the edge of the swamp and waited until he saw an eye come up, whereupon he flipped another handful of sand at it.