'd give it gladly! But it couldn't, I know;
it would only aid his power-mad schemes. So my friends and I must
escape. And we can see now no way!

"You can hear that noise? It's very loud; men are outside each door,
battering at them, and soon they must break through. How can we escape?
Do you know of a way, out of your knowledge of conditions here? Will you
tell me, old colleagues?"

He waited.

* * * * *

Fifty feet away from this scene, and missing almost all of it, was
Friday. From his post at the panel he kept throwing fearful looks at the
nearest door, which was shuddering and clanging and threatening any
moment to be wrenched off its hinges. A good thing--he was
thinking--that the doors were of stout metal. When one did go he would
get five or six of the soulless devils before they brought him down.

Carse waited tensely for the response--if one there was to be. His ears
were throbbing in unison with the regular crash of rams on metal, but
his eyes never left the convoluted mounds of intelligent matter so
fantastically featured by the internal radiance of the life-giving
liquid. Impossible, it seemed, that thoughts were stirring inside those
gruesome things....

"Please hurry!" he said in a low voice; and Leithgow repeated
desperately:

"How can we escape? Please be quick!"

Then the miracle of mechanism and matter functioned and again gave forth
the cold voice of the living dead.

"_It is my disposition to help you, Eliot Leithgow. On a shelf under one
of the tables in this room you will find a portable heat-ray. Melt a
hole in the ceiling and go out through the roof._"

"Then what can we do?"

"_In lockers behind the table there are space-suits, hanging ready for
emergencies. Don them and leave through one of the asteroid's
port-locks._"

"Ask if the ports are sealed," Carse interjected instantly.

Leithgow asked the question.

"_Yes_," replied the unhuman voice. "_But twice four to the right will
open any of them._"

* * * * *

The Master Scientist wiped his brow. Though trembling under the strain
of conversing with this machine on which his life depended, he did not
overlook a single point.

"But the asteroid's gravital pull would hold us close to it," he said.
"Is there a way of breaking free from it?"

"_You'll find the space-suits are equipped with small generators and
gravity-plates which I helped Ku