out. Penrun uttered a curse of loathing. His pistol stabbed
death into the foul insect.

He felt a touch on his arm. The girl was waiting.

"I am ready," she said quietly. "Oh, let us hurry!"

Dawn was lighting the world outside, and the driving blizzard was
already changing to rain. Penrun seized the girl's hand and ran madly
up the mountainside toward the peak. The spiders usually did not
venture out in the rain, but in the face of danger from the ship they
would be abroad as early as possible this morning.

Penrun suddenly spurted madly. Half a dozen gigantic spiders were
moving cautiously along the lower edge of the city, their bodies
looming up grotesquely in the misty rain. The girl stumbled, struck
her head against a boulder, and lay still. Penrun caught her up in his
arms and sprinted madly up the steep slope.

* * * * *

A rock loosened by his flying feet rattled and pounded down the
hillside. Instantly the monsters whirled round, sighted him and
started in pursuit. With a mighty leap he cleared a ten-foot ledge,
carrying his unconscious burden, and plunged into the sheltering mist
of the clouds. Up, up! Thank God for the weak gravity!

A swishing rattle of claws on rock shot by them in the fog, turned and
swept back. Penrun sprang straight upward, rising nearly a dozen feet
in the air as the monsters streaked past underneath.

Only a little farther! Savagely he forced his failing strength to
carry them up the slope. The air was chilling fast and the mist
thinning. He broke into clear air as the fog behind them filled with
the rattle of racing claws on the barren granite and the grating roar
of the baffled monsters, seeking frantically for their intended
victims.

He staggered on another hundred yards before he collapsed with lungs
laboring desperately in the rarefied air.

Below them a bristly monster charged out of the fog, sighted them
lying up among the rocks, and leaped after them. Penrun jerked up a
pistol with trembling fingers and loosed its deadly ray. The huge
spider stumbled and ploughed head-on among the rocks with a flurry of
legs. It rose loggily, for its fierce energy was dwindling rapidly in
the biting cold. Again the pistol crackled. The gigantic insect
toppled over and rolled down the mountainside into the fog and
vanished.

"Are we safe now?"

Penrun turned. The girl was now sitting up somewhat unsteadily, with
an ugly bruise on her forehead.