the red fire of anger. Grant did not hesitate. As he landed on the ground he fired a heat-bolt at one of Relegar’s left legs. It smoked. There was an odor of burned hair. The queer material of the leg glowed white for an instant and then burned in two and the bottom part dropped off.
Relegar squealed. His two eyes almost exploded in a rage of red. He wasn’t permanently injured—he would grow a new leg—but he was furious because he dared not come close to the shield. The radiation would paralyze him within a couple of seconds. Grant saw his body sag a little on the corner where the leg had been, and then he had one of those flashes of intuition that every being had to have, to live long in the swamp. He knew how to win this fight. He trained the heat-gun on the second leg on the same side and pressed the trigger. That leg burned in two and Relegar’s body sagged still more.
Grant started on the third one. A feeling of triumph was growing in him. Then Relegar charged.
Grant hadn’t expected that. There was little he could do but hold the shield frantically before him to try to ward off the fangs and the mandibles.
He had had no idea that the Uranian’s body was so heavy. It seemed to Grant the thing must weigh three or four hundred pounds. It thundered into him and knocked him over as if he had been a straw. The heavy hoofs galloped over him. He was surprised, but he rolled on over and came to his feet, shooting.
He got the fourth and fifth legs this time. Relegar’s body sagged considerably, but the spider, his entire body turning red with rage, spun around and charged again. This time the great mouth was open, the fangs ready, and the mandibles were extended. Grant left himself open until he could feel the spider’s fetid breath in his face, then he flung out his shield.
The sharp fangs struck it. Relegar turned into a tornado of fury for perhaps a second, trying to shake the skin from his teeth. But it was too late. The skin came loose, but the radiation had paralyzed the spider. He sank feebly to the ground with the shield under him. His eyes glared with unutterable malignant hate, but that was all. His muscles were impotent.
Grant stood a few feet away, getting his breath, feeling the trip-hammer in his temple slow down to normal. Then he aimed. The sixth, seventh, and eighth legs burned off. He put the pistol in its holster.
“I’m not going to try to kill you,” he said. “I suppose that’s impossible anyway, short of cutting you up into small pieces, and I don’t relish that idea. But I’ll leave you the snake-skin. It will have passed the peak of its radioactivity by tomorrow and you can start back for The Pass. But you won’t go back very fast. You’ve got legs on only one side. It’s going to be slow navigating, especially on water. In fact, I think maybe you’ll have to wait until you grow some new legs.”
He patted his pockets filled with half a million dollars’ worth of echindul stones. “Long before that I’ll be in Aphrodite depositing my stones at the First Interplanetary Bank.”
He watched Relegar’s eyes turn dead, cold black, then he screwed on his helmet, adjusted the oxygen, and stepped off into the brown water. He felt rather good, wading through the mud at the bottom of the swamp. He was somewhat astonished that it had fallen to him, a nobody, to be the means of breaking up Relegar’s hold on The Pass. But it was a very satisfactory feeling. He thought about Beth and New Jersey and strawberries with fresh cream. He sighed happily. His luck had changed.
You Too Can Be a Millionaire
Mark Renner looked anxiously backward as he ran up the street to the place where the faded gold lettering on one window said “Jewelry.” That would be a good place to hide, he thought. Most of the plate-glass windows and doors along the street were broken out as in fact they were everywhere, and had been for twenty years—but one of the jewelry windows and the door, protected by iron grating, were still whole and would help to conceal him.
With one final glance back at the corner, he climbed the grating, scuttled across it, and dropped down. Then, keeping low, he ducked in among the dusty old counters and stopped abruptly, listening.
He heard Conley’s slow, slapping footsteps as the tall man rounded the corner and came up the street. He forced himself to breathe softly in spite of the pounding of his heart. The dust rose a little around him and got in his nostrils and he wanted to sneeze, but by sheer willpower he choked it down.
Conley was from the Machine—Central Audit Bureau—and the Machine knew by now that Mark was three thousand points in the red. Three thousand points—when you were supposed to be always within one day’s point of a balance. You were allowed twelve hundred points a day, so Mark was now two and a half days in debit.
He’d been walking the streets in a sort of daze, signing slips right and left while his own pad of slips stayed in his pocket. He hadn’t cared, either, until now, because in this brave new world of the one freedom—freedom from work—he was abominably unhappy.
Everybody struggled all day to get enough points to stay even with Central, and what good did it do them? You got even one day, but the next day you had to start all over. There wasn’t any point to it. So he’d said to hell with it, and for five days now he’d ignored the Machine entirely except to line up automatically once a day at the concourse to have his card audited. And for five straight days the balance had
