e retaining yard whose end was formed by the round
structure that was his goal.

Beneath him and to the left the broad street swarmed with figures: the
tall ones of the Rogans and the shorter, sturdier ones of slaves. Any
one of those dozens of grotesque pedestrians might glance up, see him,
and pick him off with the deadly tubes. Under his fingers the mortar
crumbled and left him hanging, more than once, by one hand. For fully
five minutes his life hung by a thread apt to be severed at any time.
But--he made it. Helped by the decreased gravity of the red spot, and
released from inhibiting fear by the fact that he was already,
figuratively, a dead man, he performed the incredible.

With a last slithering step downward, he landed lightly on the near
wall of the enclosure, and started along its broad top toward his
objective.

Now he was in plain sight of any one who might be looking out the
windows of the tower building or from the dome ahead of him; but this
was a chance he had to take, and at least he was concealed from the
swarms in the street. Making no effort to hide himself by crawling
along the top of the wall, he straightened up and began to run toward
the giant dome.

* * * * *

Hardly had he gone a dozen steps when he suddenly understood the
meaning of the high-walled enclosure to his right!

Off in a far corner rose a slate colored mound that at first glance he
had taken for a great heap of inanimate dirt. The mound began to move
toward him--and metamorphosed into an animal, a thing that made Brand
blink his eyes to see if he were dreaming, and then stop, appalled,
to look at it.

He saw a body that dwarfed the high retaining walls to comparative
insignificance. It had a tree-like tail that dragged behind it; and a
thirty-foot, serpentine neck at the end of which was a head like a sugar
barrel that split into cavernous jaws lined with backward-pointing
teeth. Two eyes were set wide apart in the enormous head, eyes that were
dead and cold and dull, yet glinting with senseless ferocity. It was the
sort of thing one sees in delirium.

With increasing energy the creature made for him, till finally it was
approaching his sector of the wall at a lumbering run that was rapid
for all its ungainliness.

It was apparent at a glance that the snaky neck, perched atop the
lofty shoulder structure, would raise the head with its gaping jaws to
his level on the wall! Brand ran. And a