shapes ahead, glowing lines of fire, luminous masses
like streamers of cloud that looped themselves into contorted forms
and writhed vividly until they straightened into sharp lines of speed
that bore down upon the fleeing craft and the human food that was
escaping these hungry snouts.

Chet saw them dead ahead; he saw the out-thrust heads, each ending in
a great suction-cup, the row of disks that were eyes blazing above,
and the gaping maw below. He altered their course not a hair's breadth
as he bore down upon them, while the monsters swelled prodigiously
before his eyes. And the thunderous roar from astern came with never a
break, while the ship itself ceased its trembling protest against the
sudden blast and drove smoothly on and into the waiting beasts.

There was a hardly perceptible thudding jar. They were free! And the
forward lookouts showed only the brilliant fires of distant suns and
one more glorious than the rest that meant a planet.

* * * * *

Chet turned at last to face Schwartzmann and his pilot where they had
clung helplessly to a metal stanchion. Four or five others crept in
from the cabin aft; their blanched faces told of the fear that bad
gripped them--fear of the serpents; fear, too, of the terrific plunges
into which the ship had been thrown. Chet Bullard drew the metal
control-ball back into neutral and permitted himself the luxury of a
laugh.

"You're a fine bunch of highway-men," he told Schwartzmann; "you'll
steal a ship you can't fly; then come up here above the R. A. level
and get mixed up with those brutes. What's the idea? Did you think you
would just hop over to the Dark Moon? Some little plan like that in
your mind?"

Again the dark, heavy face of Schwartzmann flushed deeply; but it was
his own men upon whom he turned.

"You," he told the pilot--"you were so clever; you would knock this
man senseless! You would insist that you could fly the ship!"

The pilot's eyes still bulged with the fear he had just experienced.
"But, Herr Schwartzmann, it was you who told me--"

A barrage of unintelligible words cut his protest short. Schwartzmann
poured forth imprecations in an unknown tongue, then turned to the
others.

"Back!" he ordered. "Bah!--such men! The danger it iss over--yess!
This pilot, he will take us back safely."

He turned his attention now to the waiting Chet. "Herr Bullard, iss it
not--yess?"

He launched into extended apologies--he