Part 2

The bodies were lying in a row beneath an overhanging ledge of sandstone. They had burrowed deep into a miniature jungle of thick leaved canal weeds, and it had taken him a long time to find them. The gleam of four shiny new B-type spacesuits, less carefully concealed, had finally ended the search. Kent and Ray had been busy this morning.

Standing where he was, Joe could look down the green and red dotted slope and see the ashes of the picnic fire, the scatterings of food that the night-crawling _nolls_ had found unpalatable. And, blown by Mars' occasional winds--or taken by alien hands--to a spot only a few feet from where it had been thrown away, was the scrap of paper with his letterhead on it. The paper that he and Kent had marked up during their discussion of tomorrow night's flight to _Aarn_, Callisto.

_If they didn't actually hear us talking_, Joe thought, _it was that paper that started the whole thing._

He said loudly: "Are you here, _Uarnl_? You thought it was perfect, didn't you? You thought you could repossess your bodies as the liner went off-world. Well, look at this!"

With executival thoroughness, he blasted the four bodies into cinders.

* * * * *

Sarah came out of the kitchen as Joe opened the canal door and let himself in. He turned and paid the cabby and the skimmer moved off.

"Hello, darling," she said, and tugged at his arm. "I've got a swell supper fixed!"

Joe smiled at her as he shrugged out of his tunic. He flung it casually over her favorite potted _Zinhaeat_. She didn't grab it off. _I should have been a detective_, he thought. He followed her into the kitchen.

"Anything interesting happen today?" Sarah began to arrange the table, moving things here and there fussily. She looked at Joe from the corner of her eye. "That's about how you like it, isn't it?" she asked.

Joe said, "That's fine." He ground out his cigarette on a clean plate. Sarah would have taken his head off if he had ever done that.

"No," he went on, "nothing happened. Same old stuff."

They sat down to eat. Joe tasted his soup. It was rotten. He wondered if they cooked like that all over Callisto, or only in _Aarn_.

"Is it all right, darling?" Sarah was looking at him brightly, her fingers twined under her chin with the left pinkie extended, her head cocked to one side. It was all so cute that it made Joe sick. He decided that if the showdown were put off much longer he'd never be able to stand the sight of her again.

"You haven't called me 'darling' since our days of stardust and chivalry," he said. "Call me Joe."

"What?"

"I said--call--me--Joe."

Sarah pushed her plate away. Her brown eyes were muddy.

"I wasn't hungry anyway," she said coldly.

Big Kent and Ray came through the door that led into the living room. Kent leaned against the wall and folded his massive arms. He grinned mockingly at Joe. "We never give up," he said. Ray stared nervously and wet his lips.

Joe shoved back his chair inch by inch.

"_Uarnl's_ dead," he said. "He blundered things in my office and got scared and tried to get off-world in a passenger. The Patrol blasted him."

Sarah rose calmly and looked at Ray and Kent. Their faces were stony. She said: "_Lof--Dir_--I think the four of us together can break down his resistance to Occupancy." Her eyes traveled to an empty corner of the kitchen. "Are you ready, _Uarnl_?"

She faced Joe again, a sly smile on her lips.

"_Uarnl_ wasn't killed, Yoe--atomics don't kill us. The passenyer was."

Joe wasn't surprised when she floated away from the chair and toward him, her slippers hardly seeming to touch the floor. He'd been expecting to be attacked.

But what almost broke him into little pieces was her third eye--the one that blinked open in the middle of her forehead, brushing aside a brittle shell of skin and glaring at him with its wide, unhuman hunger. Then, for one terrible second, his brain felt packed in ice; the room was grotesque, filled with alien contrivances. The only sensible thing in it was _Ih's_ warm, familiar third eye.

With all his melting strength, Joe thought, "_I destroyed the bodies!_" and the whole scene dangled unmoving before him, the weird, distant setting for the climax of a play, as he heard his own voice in a wrenching groan:

"Our bodies--destroyed!"

Appalling misery and hatred for _himself_ rocked Joe's brain. Then _Uarnl_ recoiled, as the _Aarnians'_ rapport was broken.

Joe cried chokingly, "Lieutenant--Lieutenant Smith!"

The canal door burst open and Lieutenant Smith of Mars Detain, who had been hugging the narrow metal landing ledge, came in like the proverbial tornado. What he'd heard had more than convinced him. The deadly little sphere in his hands started to make sharp spitting sounds.

Sarah and Kent and Ray and the invisible _Uarnl_ screamed. All together, in a dissonance of agony and fear and death.

* * * * *

Then, three of them stood loosely, in puzzled silence.

Big Kent brushed a hand across his eyes. "Ray," he muttered, "what in hell were you yelling about?"

Ray looked at him and sank into the nearest chair.

"Yelling?" he said bewilderedly. His fingers began to unconsciously perform on the chair arm. "I don't know. Was I yelling?"

Sarah was in Joe's arms, her blue-black hair sending its aching fragrance into his nostrils. "Joe," she whispered, "Joe, what happened?"

He tipped back her head, ran a finger over her smooth, brown forehead. Hypnosis--to paralyze and freeze him, to weaken him. He drew her face against his shoulder again.

What _had_ happened? What would those Psychologists back in Iowa say if this story ever reached their ears? _The barrier?--the "some sort of block" in my mind, my freakish mind, that keeps out Projectors--and Aarnians?_

"Kent," he said, "fix us all some drinks. Lieutenant Smith's got a story to tell us--about that picnic."