strength. He grabbed her, his hands, angry hands on her throat—

And lightning struck.

It bounded and bounced off rock a dozen feet from them. It shook the earth and blasted the rock and pieces like shrapnel cluttered all around them and struck them too and Marcia felt hot blood on her arm and it was her own blood.

But Slade had been momentarily stunned and she was running again. Away from him.

But away from the helicopter too. At first she did not realize that but when she did realize it, it was too late. If she doubled back now, she would rush into Slade's arms.

She ran—into the sea.

It was suddenly, unexpectedly calm. It merely eddied around her ankles, as if waiting for something. The storm seemed to be waiting too, lightning holding back, the thunder stilled, even the rain hanging there in the black heavy sky, waiting....

Slade came after her, stalking through the surf.

A single bolt of lightning lanced down at them and a great engulfing roar lifted Marcia, carried her, stunned her, and then the rain pelted down again and the sea was an angry sea and the air was supercharged with ozone and another smell. Like seared flesh.

Like seared flesh.

She saw Adam Slade then. Slade was down in a foot of water, face down. He was not moving and the water lapped around him, over him. She went to him, walking slowly.

The men from the helicopter were there too. They had seen in that final flash of lightning.

"Are you all right, miss?" one of them shouted.

"Yes. Slade?"

They turned him over. They looked at him. "Dead," one of them said.

"Dead," she echoed. She would have collapsed, but they caught her.

hen the rain really came down, not as it had come before, which was hard enough. It came in huge globes of water and each globe was as big as your head and if it hit it could stun you.

"Slade?" someone cried as the globes exploded violently in the surf around them.

"He's dead. He'll keep."

And they went back to the helicopter with Marcia, to await the end of the storm there.

When it was over, when the sky was not black but merely the color of lead, they returned down the beach for Slade's body.

But Slade wasn't there.

"But he was dead!" Marcia said incredulously.

One of the men smiled. "He didn't go anyplace under his own power. He was dead, all right. The storm took his body out to sea, is all."

They stood there for a moment, gazing out across the black troubled water of the infant ocean on the infant earth. A billion years ago....

Slade was out there. Slade, dead. Out there with the tides and the waters and the frequent electric storms—

"Out there with a million bacteriological parasites on his dead body and in his dead body, which he brought with him," Marcia said, dreamily.

"What are you talking about, miss?"

Out there in the electric dawn of earth, with the bacteria which lived in his body as they lived in all other bodies. Out there with them, dead.

Food for them.

Food and water and air heavy with ozone and the electric storms.

Marcia laughed hysterically. It was a story she wanted to write.

But she wouldn't write it.

Slade was a killer, condemned to die. But Slade, dead out there with his bacteria, Slade evil to man and human society but not necessarily evil in the implacable ways of nature or perhaps grimly, terribly evil—Slade out there, dead on the bosom of the primordial waters, Slade back in time a billion years before life had been born on Earth....

She laughed hysterically as they led her away from the water. They slapped her face, gently at first, then harder. "I'll be all right," she managed to say.

She would be all right. She could live to forget it.

But Slade out there.

Slade.