himself--let him kill his own snakes!

That the man was having trouble there was no doubt. He looked once
more behind him as if at something that pursued; then swung the
ball-control to throw the ship off her course.

The craft answered sluggishly, and Chet Bullard grinned where he lay
helpless upon the floor; for he knew that his ship should have been
thrown crashingly aside with such a motion as that. The answer was
plain: the flask of super-detonite was exhausted; here was the last
feeble explosion of the final atoms of the terrible explosive that was
being admitted to the generator. And to cut in another flask meant the
opening of a hidden valve.

Chet forgot the pain of his swelling hands to shake with suppressed
mirth. This was going to be good! He forgot it until, through a
lookout, he saw a writhing, circling fire that wrapped itself about
the ship and jarred them to a halt.

The serpents!--those horrors from space that had come with the coming
of the Dark Moon! They had disrupted the high-level traffic of the
world; had seized great liners; torn their way in; stripped these of
every living thing, and let the empty shells crash back to earth. Chet
had forgotten or he had failed to realize the height at which this new
pilot was flying. Only speed could save them; the monsters, with their
snouts that were great suction-cups, could wrench off a metal
door--tear out the glass from a port!

* * * * *

He saw the luminous mass crush itself against a forward lookout and
felt the jar of its body against their ship. Soft and vaporous, these
cloud-like serpents seemed as they drifted through space; yet the
impact, when they struck, proved that this new matter had mass.

Chet saw the figure at the controls stagger back and cower in fear;
the man's bullet-shaped head was covered by his upraised arms: there
was some horror outside those windows that his eyes had no wish to
see. Beside him the towering figure of Schwartzmann appeared; he had
sprung into Chet's view, and he screamed orders at the fear-stricken
pilot.

"Fool! Swine!" Schwartzmann was shouting. "Do something! You said you
could fly this ship!" In desperation he leaped forward and reached for
the controls himself.

Chet's blurred faculties snapped sharply to attention. That yellow
glow against the port--the jarring of their ship--it meant instant
destruction once that searching snout found some place where it could
secu