her quick ears had
caught an instant before his: a distant pandemonium of ringing gongs
and siren shrieks, and squealing cries of a multitude of agitated
Rogans.

"What the devil--" began Dex. But again Greca raised her hand to
silence him, and listened once more. As she listened, her sea-blue
eyes grew wider and wider with horror. Then, frantically, she began to
race down a long corridor away from the street door.

Dex hastened to follow her. "What is it?" he demanded, when he had
caught up to her flying little feet. "This is not the way up to the
room where Brand--"

"Your friend is not there," she interrupted. She explained swiftly,
distractedly: "From the shouts of the Rogans I learn that he got into
the great dome building, somehow, and then was driven into the pen of
the...."

Dex could not get the next term she used. But her telepathic message
of the peril she mentioned formed in his mind clearly enough.

He got a flashing brain picture of a great, high-walled yard with a
monster in it of the kind he had caught a close-range glimpse a short
while before. Also, he saw a blurred, tiny figure, running from wall
to wall, that was Greca's imagining of Brand and his efforts to escape
the enormous beast.

"Good heavens!" groaned Dex. "Penned in with one of the things they
showed me while I was stretched on the rack! Are you sure, Greca?"

She nodded, and tried to run faster. "This way," she gasped, turning
down a passage to the left that ended in a massive metal door. "This
leads to the enclosure. Oh, if only we can be in time!"

Her slim fingers tore at a massive bolt that secured the door. "Here,"
said Dex, wrenching it open for her. And they stepped out into thin
sunlight, onto a hard surface of reddish ground that was crisscrossed
with innumerable rounded furrows like the tracks old-fashioned,
fifty-passenger airplane wheels used to make on soft landing fields.

* * * * *

Greca shrieked, and pointed to the far end of the enclosure. Down
there, flattened against the wall of the dome building, was Brand. And
waddling toward him with a tread that caused the ground to quiver, was
a mate to the hideous creature the Rogans had used to terrify Dex in
the torture chamber.

Dex leveled the tube he was carrying, swore, hit it frenziedly against
his hand. "How do you work this damned thing, Greca--Oh! Like that!
There--see if _that_ puts a sting in your hide!"

The distant monst