He awoke suddenly.  There were rustlings among the trees.  Something moved slowly and intermittently toward him.  It could be anything, even a creature from Boulder Lake.  He heard other sounds.  Another creature.  The first drew near, not moving in a straight line.  The second creature followed it, drawing closer to the first.

Lockley’s scalp crawled.  Creatures from space might have some of the highly-developed senses which men had lost while growing civilized—­full keenness of scent, for example.

Such a creature might be able to find Lockley and Jill in the darkness after trailing them for miles.  And so primitive a talent, in a creature farther advanced than men, was somehow more horrifying than anything else Lockley had thought of about them.  He gripped his club desperately, wholly aware that a star creature should be able to paralyze him with the terror beam....

There were whistling, squealing noises.  They were very much like the squeaks his captors had directed at each other and at him when he was blindfolded and being led downhill to imprisonment in the compost pit shell.  Very much like, but not identical.  Nevertheless, Lockley’s hair seemed to stand up on end and he raised his club in desperation.

The whistling squeals grew shriller.  Then there was an indescribable sound and one of the two creatures rushed frantically away.  It traveled in great leaps through the blackness under the trees.

And then there was a sudden whiff of a long-familiar odor, smelled a hundred times before.  It was the reek of a skunk, stalked by a carnivore and defending itself as skunks do.  But a skunk was nothing like a terror beam.  Its effluvium offended only one sense, affected only one set of sensation nerves.  The terror beam....

Lockley opened his mouth to laugh, but did not.  The thing at the back of his mind had come forward.  He was appalled.

Jill said shakily, “What’s the matter?  What’s happened?  That smell—­”

“It’s only a skunk,” said Lockley evenly.  “He just told me some very bad news.  I know how the terror beam works now.  And there’s not a thing that can be done about it.  Not a thing.  It can’t be!”

He raged suddenly, there in the darkness, because he saw the utter hopelessness of combatting the creatures who’d taken over Boulder Lake.  There was nothing to keep them from taking over the whole earth, no matter what sort of monsters or not-monsters they might be.

CHAPTER 6

It was nine o’clock at night when Lockley killed the porcupine, and ten by the time Jill had gone back to sleep huddled between the projecting roots of a giant tree.  Shortly after midnight Lockley had been awakened when a skunk defeated a hungry predator within a hundred yards of their bivouac.  But some time in between, there was another happening of much greater importance elsewhere.