and considered his predicament. The obvious answer was a faulty alarm system and perhaps there had never been an alien ship nearby in the first place. That had to be the answer. Joe was mad at himself for having been so easily frightened over nothing. He reached for a small gold handbag and shakily took out a cigarette.

A slight breeze blew a wisp of hair in such a way that it tickled his nose and Joe reached up lazily to brush it back into place. The impact of his action struck home like a drop forge and he sat up rapidly and blinked at the bright sunlight. At first he questioned his sanity, but a quick look around convinced him that he wasn't seeing things. There couldn't be any breeze or warm sunlight in a spaceship, but there they were. One minute he had been in his ship and the next he was . . . well he didn't know where. He pinched himself through his skirt and it stung but he did not wake up. The bluish tint of the grass and trees con- vinced him that he wasn't on Earth, and he wondered where in the universe he was and how he had gotten here.

He was sitting on a grassy spot in what appeared to be a semi-tropical area for whatever that was worth. In the distance was a low hill and a path that seemed to lead in that general direction. He knew that he would have to look around and the high vantage point seemed like the place to start so he began walking down the path. The thought then crossed his mind, or perhaps it was woman's intuition, that this path might be a trail for some large, hostile animal so he proceeded with caution.

Joe was about half way to the hill when he first heard the cry of an animal in pain. It sounded like a rather small animal and this guess was substantiated just around the next bend in the trail. There beside the path he saw an extremely ugly greenish-brown animal with one leg caught in a tangle of vines. It struggled frantically to free itself but without any success. The wind shifted slightly and Joe nearly gagged when he caught the odor of the beast which was worse than anything he had ever encountered before. He held his nose and stepped around the animal and continued on his way.

He had gone about fifty yards and the pitiful cries of the beast were still clearly audible when the female side of him let her feelings be known. Perhaps the thing was ugly with a terrible odor, but the poor animal needed help, so the fifty yards were rapidly retraced. Joe spoke in Jo- Anne's softest voice as he reached down to loosen the matted vines. The beast stopped struggling and sat quivering in fear but it lost no time in darting into the dense foliage once it was free.

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