The first half mile into the swamp hadn't been so bad, but now Mallard began to feel really afraid. There were things in here that no spaceman had ever seen and against some of them the small blaster on his hip would be about as effective as a popgun.

A little way ahead of him, he could dimly see the naked body of the Mercurian swamp girl and he swore enviously at the way she slipped through the dense fern growth, her webbed feet gripping the mud firmly.
Once she held up her hand warningly and he slipped down behind a fallen tree fern to let a huge plant slug glide past. The thing was nearly forty feet in length and it could move with the speed of an express train.

When it was gone, he got up and followed the swamp girl again. He hugged the helmet to him closer and grinned at the feel of the strange metal in his hands. That helmet was his one last chance for all the things he had ever wanted and he would hold on to it as long as he had life left. With that helmet he could be free of Bill Olger and D'ulio, the Martian, and go back to Earth with more wealth than a space rat like himself had ever brought back. It was now, he reflected, one month from the night he had met them, back in Venusport....

Mallard was sitting at a table in the Green Star the night they came in. Sitting there, drinking Sre, the raw native wine, and wondering if he could afford another glass of the stuff. He was surrounded by the riff-raff of the spaceways and his nerves were raw from a week-long bout with the Sre.

The two men came in, looked the dingy place over for a moment, then made directly for his table. They were both big men, the Earth man a red-haired giant with the cold eyes and the hard, ruthless face of the space rat. Mallard had come to know plenty of men like him since he had been kicked out of the Patrol. Hard, bitter men, shrewd and utterly conscienceless. The Martian beside him he hardly noticed.
His red, skeleton-like face was the typical Martian mask and Mallard wasted no time trying to form an estimate of him. No Earth man ever would know what a Martian was like until he'd lived beside him for years—sometimes not even then. And, anyway, Mallard wasn't too interested in either of them. Not even when they came over and sat at his table.

"I'm Bill Olger," the Earth man began without preliminaries. "This is my friend, D'ulio, one of the smartest scientists Mars has ever produced. We know about you. You're George Mallard, owner of the Space Lark."

"If you're getting ready to make a touch you can save your breath,"
Mallard said sourly. "I haven't got a hundred credits to my name."

"We're not getting ready to make a touch, Mallard," Olger said. "We're getting ready to let you in on the chance of a lifetime. Now, do you want to let us buy you a drink of something decent while we tell you about it, or would you rather keep on sitting here alone drinking this slop?"

Mallard looked from his hard face to the spidery red mask of the Martian, then shrugged his shoulders and pushed out his empty glass.
Olger beckoned to the Venusian waiter and presently Mallard was sipping a glass of pale green brandy that soothed his raw nerves like the almost forgotten touch of an Earth woman's hands. Bill Olger yanked his chair closer and bent his head over the table.

"Look, Mallard, I'm not going to beat around the bush with you. I've kept pretty close tabs on you since you were kicked out of the Patrol and I know you're at

The Rhizoid Kill