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 planets and from this he was busily absorbing whole pages at a glance.

In this happy holiday mood they came to the lake, dried up a half acre of mud with one blast of the 110, pitched a canopy at the water's edge complete with table and chairs, made a wharf by extending a log over the water and generally got things ready to fish.

Hippocrates mixed a cool drink and baited a hook while Ole Doc took his ease and drank himself into a comfortable frame of mind.

"Wonder what I'll get," said Ole Doc. He made his first cast, disposed himself comfortably on the log to watch the motor lure tow its bait around the surface of the lake.

The huge jungle trees reared over the water and the air was still and hot. The yellow lake glowed like amber under a yellow sky. And they began to catch a strange assortment of the finny tribes.

Hippocrates swatted at the mosquitoes for a while. Their beaks got dented against his hide but they annoyed him with their high whine. Finally he was seized with inspiration—direct from "Camping and Hiking Jaunts on Strange Worlds"—and unfolded the force umbrella. It was no more than a stick with a driver in it but its directional lobes could be changed in intensity and area until they covered half a square mile. It was a handy thing to have in a rainstorm on such planets as Sargo where the drops weigh two pounds. And it was handy here where it pushed, on low intensity, the mosquitoes out from the canopy and put them several hundred yards away where they could asst in impotent frenzy and thwarted rage. Hippocrates put the stick on full so its beams, leaning against the surrounding trees, would keep it in place, and devoted himself to another book he brought out of his knapsack, "Wild Animals I Wish I Hadn't Known."

And into this quiet and peaceful scene moved a jetbomb at the silent speed of two thousand miles an hour. It came straight down from a silver speck which hung in the saffron sky. It had enough explosive in it to knock a house flat. And it was armed.

Ole Doc had just hooked a popeyed monstrosity, Hippocrates had just reached the place where Daryl van Daryl was being swallowed alive by a ramposaurus on Ranameed, and the bomb hit.

It struck the top of the force screen and detonated. The lobes of the screen cantilevered against the trees and kicked six down so hard their roots stuck quivering in the air. The canopy went flat. The log went into the water and the jug of rumades leaped sideways and smote Hippocrates on the back of the neck.

For an instant neither Hippocrates nor Ole Doc had any idea of what had happened. It might have been a fish or a ramposaurus. But in a moment, from the smell in the air, they knew it was a bomb.

Hippocrates instantly went into Chapter Twenty-one paragraph nine OLE MOTHER METHUSELAH