wn beside Dalla's chair. Sarnax was
firing with his rifle at some target in the direction of the lifter
tubes; Dirzed lay slumped over the barricade, and one glance at his
crumpled figure was enough to tell Verkan Vall that he was dead.

"You fill magazines for us," he told Dalla, then crawled to Dirzed's
place at the door. "What happened, Sarnax?"

"They shoved over the barricade at the lifter tubes and came out into
the well. I got a couple, they got Dirzed, and now they're holed up in
rooms all around the circle. They--Aah!" He fired three shots,
quickly, around the edge of the door. "That stopped that." The
Assassin crouched to insert a fresh magazine into his rifle.

[Illustration: ]

Verkan Vall risked one eye around the corner of the doorway, and as he
did, there was a red flash and a dull roar, unlike the blue flashes
and sharp cracking reports of the pistols and rifles, from the doorway
of the gun room. He wondered, for a split second, if it might be one
of the fowling pieces he had seen there, and then something whizzed
past his head and exploded with a soft _plop_ behind him. Turning, he
saw a pool of gray vapor beginning to spread in the middle of the
room. Dalla must have got a breath of it, for she was slumped over the
chair from which she had just risen.

Dropping the submachine-gun and gulping a lungful of fresh air from
outside, Verkan Vall rushed to her, caught her by the heels, and
dragged her into Prince Jirzyn's bedroom, beyond. Leaving her in the
middle of the floor, he took another deep breath and returned to the
drawing room, where Sarnax was already overcome by the sleep-gas.

He saw the serving table from which he had got the brandy, and dragged
it over to the bedroom door, overturning it and laying it across the
doorway, its legs in the air. Like most Akor-Neb serving tables, it
had a gravity-counteraction unit under it; he set this for double
minus-gravitation and snapped it on. As it was now above the inverted
table, the table did not rise, but a tendril, of sleep-gas, curling
toward it, bent upward and drifted away from the doorway. Satisfied
that he had made a temporary barrier against the sleep-gas, Verkan
Vall secured Dalla's hunting pistol and spare magazines and lay down
at the bedroom door.

For some time, there was silence outside. Then the besiegers evidently
decided that the sleep-gas attack had been a success. An Assassin,
wearing a gas mask and carrying a submachine-gun,