The glass was thick, perfectly clear. Only its glimmer in the sun said they were imprisoned. Beyond the field, the ever dying and growing jungle undulated like a green sea. Just outside the glass, the ladder lay on the gravel where the patrolman had dropped it—within arm's reach and it might as well have been light years away.  
"Look!" Dorothy cried. "The scratch on my finger's already healed." She held up her finger and there was no mark on it. Vulcan's power was working, building a life then to tear it down. Each soul-wringing second created beauty, clear blue-eyed, honey-haired beauty—to transform it as swiftly into ugliness....
 
It was the first time in Norman's eventful life that he had ever stared defeat in the face. He had met death before and he had been in some pretty tight spots but always there had been some way out. Not here. There was no possible way to climb a twenty-foot wall of perpendicular oil-slick glass.
 
"I'm afraid I've failed you, Dorothy," he said. In his mind now was only the thought of something he must not do. He couldn't allow her to go through the horror he had seen on Johnny's gray face. After two hours, when he saw the first gray hair—he looked down at his hands. They were his only weapons against a longer torture. Could he kill Dorothy with his own hands...?
 
"Well," Dorothy broke in on his thoughts. "Sade wins; and when we go, the whole universe is next." Her voice was a full octave lower than Norman had first heard it when she appeared at his galley door.
 
Norman walked over and stood before her. "Whatever happens," he said, "I want you to know this—that I've fallen in love with you. You're the bravest woman I've ever known and the most beautiful. That combination usually doesn't go together."
 
She looked up at him with very blue and serious eyes. "I've been in love with you for a long time," she said. "Ever since I first saw your picture in the paper. That's why I came with you."
 
Her words were cut off by Norman's lips. Then quickly he left her and walked back to the glass, staring out at the wind-whipped jungle. Why wait? Why go through this torture any longer? Get it over with now!
 
"Gods of the universe, forgive me," he whispered and turned to take her throat in his hands.
 
Light flashed across his face. It was Dorothy's mirror. She held it, smoothing her sun-burnished hair. A thought burst into his consciousness like a butterfly from a cocoon.
 
He jumped over and snatched the mirror from her hand, ripped his watch from his wrist and flipped off the crystal with his thumbnail, letting the watch drop to the ground.
 
"What're you doing!"
 
He didn't bother to answer. His pulse was liquid fire as he held the watch crystal close to the glass wall with one hand and focused the rays of the sun into it with the mirror. A thin curl of smoke rose from the jungle across the field. Then where the smoke had been an orange flame licked up from the dry grass. He dropped the mirror and the watch crystal and grabbed Dorothy close to him in the center of their prison, holding her tightly.
 
"Why! Why!"
 
"You'll see!"
 
Lashed by the wind, the fire spread like a flood. A blast of smoke engulfed the glass obscuring their view with its swirling whiteness. Then bits of flaming ashes dotted the smoke as the flames found new fuel in the rotted trees. Standing there, holding Dorothy in his arms, Norman saw the glass around them slowly darken. Quickly, as the wind brought the increasing heat upon them, the glass turned black and all he could see was the wild smoke rolling across the hole at the top of their stifling cage. He felt Dorothy coughing. Heat swam in the blackness about them.
 
Then almost as suddenly as it had begun, the wind swept the smoke away and Norman tore himself away from Dorothy and sprang to the glass wall. Without waiting till the glass lightened, he ran his hand across its blistering surface. When the thermal quality of the glass permitted the passage of light and the sight of the smoldering forest across the field, Norman was half way up the slick side, climbing like a ladder the bulging ridges that encircled the glass at its invisible seams.
 
As Dorothy stared at him, unbelieving, he vaulted over the rim and jolted with stinging feet to the hot gravel outside. The metal ladder was like a live coal in his hands but he barely felt it as he threw it against the wall and ran up it like a squirrel. Sitting on the cooling rim, he drew the ladder up after him and dropped it inside for Dorothy.
 
Soon they were streaking across the steaming gravel toward the house, Dorothy's hair streaming in the smoky wind.
 
Norman burst into the big front room with Dorothy behind him. Their running feet were loud in the silent house as they sped down the corridor, Norman dreading what he would find tied to the cylinder where they had left Keren. "You don't want to see this," he said, halting at the closed door. "Try these other doors and find a gun. Sade may be back any moment!"
 
Dorothy obediently turned away as he went in and the sight that met his eyes was to figure in many a future nightmare. Half way between the door and the cylinder, Keren lay on the floor, more like some hideous reptile than a human being, staring up at him, her eyes two black holes, hate alive in them, the only life in what was left of her face.
 
Norman stepped over and picked her up, his fingers recoiling from the touch of leathern skin and bone. Her luxurious hair had vanished leaving a skull, cracked skin tight across her cheek bones. The rope that had held her to the cylinder had slipped from her shrunken wrists and how she had crawled this far, Norman couldn't tell.
 
He carried her to the cylinder, opened the heavy cap and drew out the small hose that Sade had used to restore to youth the white rat. Quickly, he sprayed the pink liquid upon her face and body—a treatment that was to rewrite all of medical science. Her cheeks swelled again to the form of a living face and like a trick of superimposed motion picture work, before his eyes Keren's skeletal structure became covered again with firm, rounded flesh, and on her head wispy black threads appeared and extended again into a silken sable mass.
 
To save the spark of life that remained with Johnny, Norman knew he had to get this material back to Earth now; which meant a finish fight for a space ship. "Are you strong enough now? We've got to ambush Sade."
 
It was an effort for Keren to reorganize her forgotten coordinations which enabled her to speak. Her lips moved soundlessly as he carried her to the door and down the passage. He explained quickly how he and Dorothy had escaped.
 
"There are guns in the tower," she managed to whisper as they entered the front room.
 
Dorothy stood at the door with two jet rifles, peering out at the still deserted field. "I found these in their bedroom," she said, handing Norman one of the guns. "Is she all right? I thought—"
 
Norman told her what he had done to revive Keren. "But here's what we do," he said, lowering Keren to a sofa. "Sade will see the empty cage and know there's something wrong when he comes in to land. He will probably attack the house. We've got to get back in the cage. Keren can vaccinate you," he nodded to Dorothy, allaying her hesitation. "When they land, I'll jump out and take care of as many as I can. Keren can get the rest from the tower."
 
"There's a glass cutter in the store room," Keren said, nodding her approval of the plan. Her cheeks were white as paper but she got up and walked unsteadily from the room.
 
"The liquid brought her back from the grave," Norman whispered to Dorothy, watching Keren walk up the hall.
 
Keren returned immediately, and gave Norman the glass-cutter, which was an instrument shaped like a small riveting hammer. "One promise," she asked. "Sade's mine. I'll be in the tower. You've got to save him for me."
 
Keren took her hypodermic from her pocket and, at Norman's smile, Dorothy permitted the needle to enter her arm. "All right. Let's go."
 
With the cutter in one hand and the rifle in the other, Norman left the house again with Dorothy running beside him.
 
At the glass cage again, it was short work to cut a narrow door at the base of the smooth wall. With an eye on the horizon, Norman quickly covered the cutter with gravel, then motioned Dorothy into the invisible enclosure that had been their prison and so nearly their mausoleum. "We'll play dead," he explained, stretching out on the gravel with the two rifles hidden under him. Dorothy lay down beside him. "When they leave the ship and come over here, I'll jump out. You stay inside in case they get a chance to shoot back."
 
Suddenly the air hummed with the flow of rockets. "Here they are!" But the sound told Norman that his job was doubled in danger. There were two ships now, the other, his own. They'd repaired it.
 
Rockets idling, they hovered over the field and slowly settled. Sade's group was now split in two parties—he couldn't surprise them both....
 
"Don't move!" Norman whispered, feeling Dorothy's soft hair against his cheek. His fingers tightened on the guns under his body. His pulse was loud in his ears. If they suspected something? But it was too late for worry now. He heard footsteps on the gravel as the sound of the rockets sputtered and died away.
 
The next second was a lifetime. Then suddenly he was on his feet. He whirled, ducked out through the hole in the glass. The guns in his hands were spitting their red streams, before his eyes found the men before him, and he played the guns like two garden hoses, spraying death. The two patrolmen fell, charred and black. But the two groups had ruined his ambush. Swart sprang aside, behind the glass wall as the flame streaked past him. Norman saw Sade standing in the door of the ship, staring at the wild scene. The door was slammed shut as Norman's guns splattered the hull with fire. Then the fight was between him and Swart alone.
 
On the opposite sides of the ring of glass, Dorothy standing there horrified between them, it was one of the strangest situations in Norman's experience. The glass was impervious to jet fire. Dorothy was perfectly safe. But as Norman moved around the wall to get a shot at Swart, the dark little man also moved, keep............