years, working and
fighting together in the wilds of the outer worlds. A thought struck
him, even as he ran. "What in th' name o' Jupiter's nine moons stopped
th' leak?" He glanced up, halted, his mouth open in amazement. "Well,
I'm a four-tailed, horn-headed Plutonian if there ain't th' boy
himself!"

Far up in the interlaced steel of the framework, so high that to his
staring comrade he seemed a naked doll, Darl stood outstretched on a
level beam, his tiny arms holding a minute square against the wall.
Lucky it was that he was so tall and his arms so long. For the saving
plate just lapped the upper rim of the hole, and stemmed the fierce
current by only a half-inch margin.

* * * * *

The throbbing atmosphere machine in the sub-surface engine-room was
replacing the lost air rapidly, and now the increasing pressure was
strong enough to hold the translucent sheet against the wall by its
own force. Jim saw the extended arms drop away. The manikin waved down
to him, then turned to the shell again, as if to examine the emergency
repair. For a moment Darl stood thus, then he was running along the
girder, was climbing, ape-like, along a latticed beam that curved up
and in, to swing down and merge with the bulge of the air-lock's
wall.

"Like a bloomin' monkey! Can't he wait till I get him down with th'
spare plane?"

But Darl wasn't thinking of coming down. Something he had seen through
the translucent repair sheet was sending him to the look-out tower
within the air-lock. Hand over hand he swung, tiny above that vast
immensity of space. In his forehead a pulse still jumped as his heart
hurried new oxygen to thirsty cells. He held his gaze steadily to the
roof. A moment's vertigo, a grip missed by the sixteenth of an inch,
the slightest failure in the perfect team-play of eye and brain, and
rippling muscle, and he would crash, a half mile beneath, against hard
rock.

At last he reached the curving side of the landing lock. But the
platform at the manhole entrance jutted diagonally below him, fifteen
feet down and twelve along the bellying curve. Darl measured the angle
with a glance as he hung outstretched, then his body became a human
pendulum over the sheer void. Back and forth, back and forth he swung,
then, suddenly, his grasp loosened and a white arc flashed through the
air.

Breathless, Jim saw the far-off figure flick across the chasm toward
the jutting platform. He saw Darl s