business?

The newsmen are really bored now. They see no doom in the bugs, and since they can't file their stories they take a dim view of the quarantine. They have gotten up an evening fishing derby with the crew members of the planes. Have to fish after dusk. The Tabbies bite too often as long as the sun is up.

Cleve has turned into a different man. He is soft-spoken and intense. His hands tremble so much that he is conducting most of his work by verbal directions with the botanist and me to carry them out. When his suggestion about blowing up the atoll was turned down he quit talking except to conduct his work. If things were half as ominous as he makes out we'd be pretty worried.

June 4—The spray planes got here and none too soon. We were running out of drinking water. The Tabbies got so thick that even at night a man would get stung insane if he went outside the screen.

The various sprays all worked well. This evening the air is relatively clear. Incidentally, the birds have been having a feast. Now the gulls are congregating to help us out like they did the Mormons in the cricket plague. The spiders are doing all right for themselves, too. In fact, now that we have sprayed the place the spiders and their confounded webs are the biggest nuisance we have to contend with. They are getting fat and sassy. Spin their webs between your legs if you stand still a minute too long. Remind me of real estate speculators in a land boom, the little bastardly opportunists. As you might gather, I don't care for brothers Arachnidae. They make everyone else nervous, too. Strangely, Cleveland, the entomologist, gets the worst jolt out of them. He'll stand for minutes at the screen watching them spin their nasty webs and skipping out to de-juice a stray Tabby that the spray missed. And he'll mutter to himself and scowl and curse them. It is hard to include them as God's creatures.

Cleve still isn't giving out with the opinions. He works incessantly and has filled two notebooks full of data. Looks to me like our work is almost done.

August 7, Year of our Lord 1956—To whom it will never concern: I can no longer make believe this is addressed to my friend, Ben Tobin. Cleveland has convinced me of the implications of our tragedy here. But somehow it gives me some crazy, necessary ray of hope to keep this journal until the end.

I think the real horror of this thing started to penetrate to me about June 6. Our big spray job lasted less than 24 hours, and on that morning I was watching for the planes to come in for a second try at it when I noticed the heavy spider webbing in the upper tree foliage. As I looked a gull dove through the trees, mouth open, eating Tabbies. Damned if the webs didn't foul his wings. At first he tore at them bravely and it looked like he was trying to swim in thin mud—sort of slow motion. Then he headed into a thick patch, slewed around at right angles and did a complete flip. Instantly three mammoth spiders the size of my fist pounced out on him and trussed him up before he could tear loose with his feet.

His pitiful squawking was what made me feel that horror for the first time. And the scene was repeated more and more often. The planes dusted us with everything they had, and it cut down the Tabbies pretty well again, but it didn't touch the spiders, of course.

And then our return radio messages started getting very vague. We were transmitting Cleve's data hourly as he compiled it, and we had been getting ordinary chatter and speculation from the Honolulu operator at the end of our message. That stopped on the sixth of June. Since then, we've had only curt acknowledgements of our data and sign-offs.

At the same time, we noticed that complete censorship on news of our situation and progress apparently hit all the long-wave radio broadcasts. Up to that time the newscasts had been feeding out a dilute and very cautious pablum about our fight against Tabby. Immediately when we noticed this news blind spot Cleve