quick dash now for
the open hatchway beyond....

Half a dozen of the bounding red beasts surged about his feet. Their
weight drove his right leg forward. He staggered, caught at his balance.
The lead cell above his head began to slip.

"Watch it, Scott!" Durval's voice cracked in his ears.

Straining every muscle against the queer weightlessness of no gravity,
Scott struggled to regain his balance. He expected another blow at his
legs as the cats leaped for the ore. It was hard to breathe the
over-heated air of his suit.

But the cats had spun away. As he caught his balance, he stared after
them, uncomprehending for an instant. The cats ran twisting in a somehow
sinister dance. The bodies were queerly bloated. Down the upper portion
of their bodies ran a heavy indentation. As they leaped and twisted, the
indentation became a fissure, a crevice.

Then two of the beasts leaped, slammed together in mid-air. But more
than two cats fell to the floor.

Their sharply angled bodies whisking back toward the depleted uranium
cells, four cats appeared with shocking suddenness.

Reproduction. Elemental fission.

Scott had to clean them out, and fast. Soon the ship would be overrun
with the energy-hungry felines.

He dashed toward the open hatch. Outside the opening, a great lead box,
eight feet by eight feet, gaped upward. Beyond, four men tensely
supported a vast lead cover.

"Is the uranium poured into the box?" he barked sharply.

"Yes, sir. All ready, Mister Jerill."

"Good." Turning from the hatch, he inverted his cell, poured out the
uranium ore in a thick stream from the open hatch back across the hold
toward the scrambling mass of cats upon the now empty rows of cells.

But he never reached the beasts.

A brawling torrent of animals leaped toward him. Hurling the container
into their mass, he leaped to one side. They lunged into the trail of
ore. Rolled, leaped, darted along the line. At the hatch edge, a
pyramiding mass of cats paused a moment. Then plummeted over. Scott fell
back against the bulkhead, his eyes fixed on the cats still scavenging
among the empty cells.

Then these too were darting for the trail of ore. The uranium was
scattered now. Cats plunged toward the new radiation in the box beyond
the hold entrance.

The inarticulate cheers of Durval and his men rang in Scott's helmet.
But his mind was already working at the next step of the problem.

"Durval," he ordered. "Get a decontaminatio