He considered the idea with sardonic appreciation.  Two days of inadequate food and such ideas came!  But he and Jill wouldn’t be the only ones to think such things if matters continued as they were going.  The towns around Boulder Lake were being evacuated.  The cordon about it had been made to retreat.  There was panic not only in America, but everywhere.  In Europe there were wild rumors of other landings of other ships of space.  The stock markets would undoubtedly close tomorrow, if they hadn’t closed today.  There’d be the beginning of a mass exodus from the larger cities, starting quietly but building up to frenzy as those who tried to leave jammed all the routes by which they could get away.  If the creatures of the spaceship wanted more than the flight of all humans from about their landing place, there would be genuine trouble.  Let them move aggressively and there would be panic and disorder and pure catastrophe, with self-exiled city dwellers desperate from hunger because they were away from market centers.  It looked as if a dozen or two monsters could wreck a civilization without the need to kill one single human being directly.

He heard a sound.  He turned off the radio, gripping the clumsy club which was probably useless against anything really threatening.

The sound continued.  There were rustlings of leaves, and then faint rattling, almost clicking noises.  Whatever the creature was, it was not large.  It seemed to amble tranquilly through the forest and the night, neither alarmed nor considering itself alarming.

The clickings again.  And suddenly Lockley knew what it was.  Of course!  He’d heard it in the compost pit shell, when he was a prisoner of the invaders from space.  He rose and moved toward the noise.  The creature did not run away.  It went about its own affairs with the same peaceful indifference as before.  Lockley ran into a tree.  He stumbled over a fallen branch on the ground.  He came to the place where the creature should be.  There was silence.  He flicked the flint of his pocket lighter and in the flash of brightness he saw his prey.  It had heard his approach.  It was a porcupine, prudently curled up into a spiky ball and placidly defying all carnivores, including men.  A porcupine is normally the one wild creature without an enemy.  Even men customarily spare it because so often it has saved the lives of lost hunters and half-starved travelers.  It accomplishes this by its bland refusal to run away from anybody.

Lockley classed himself as a half-starved traveler.  He struck with the club after a second spark from his lighter-flint.

Presently he had a small, barely smouldering fire of rotted wood.  He cooked over it, and the smell of cooking roused Jill from her exhausted slumber.

“What—­”

“We’re having a late supper,” said Lockley gravely.  “A midnight snack.  Take this stick.  There’s a loin of porcupine on it.  Be careful!  It’s hot!”