lainly
see the other vessel, a small black circle against the faintly luminous
disk. As it leaped into clear relief in the beam of his powerful
searchlight, Seaton focused the great attractor upon the fugitive car
and threw in the lever which released the full force of that mighty
magnet, while Crane attracted the attention of the vessel's occupants by
means of a momentary burst of solid machine-gun bullets, which he knew
would glance harmlessly off the steel hull.

* * * * *

After an interminable silence, DuQuesne drew himself out of his seat. He
took a long inhalation, deposited the butt of his cigarette carefully in
his ash tray, and made his way to his room. He returned with three heavy
fur suits provided with air helmets, two of which he handed to the
girls, who were huddled in a seat with their arms around each other.
These suits were the armor designed by Crane for use in exploring the
vacuum and the intense cold of dead worlds. Air-tight, braced with fine
steel netting, and supplied with air at normal pressure from small tanks
by automatic valves, they made their wearers independent of surrounding
conditions of pressure and temperature.

"The next thing to do," DuQuesne stated calmly, "is to get the copper
off the outside of the ship. That is the last resort, as it robs us of
our only safeguard against meteorites, but this is the time for
last-resort measures. I'm going after that copper. Put these suits on,
as our air will leave as soon as I open the door, and practically an
absolute vacuum and equally absolute zero will come in."

As he spoke, the ship was enveloped in a blinding glare and they were
thrown flat as the vessel slowed down in its terrific fall. The thought
flashed across DuQuesne's mind that they had already entered the
atmosphere of that monster globe and were being slowed down and set
afire by its friction, but he dismissed it as quickly as it had
come--the light in that case would be the green of copper, not this
bluish-white. His next thought was that there had been a collision of
meteors in the neighborhood, and that their retardation was due to the
outer coating. While these thoughts were flickering through his mind,
they heard an insistent metallic tapping, which DuQuesne recognized
instantly.

"A machine-gun!" he blurted in amazement. "How in...."

"It's Dick!" screamed Dorothy, with flashing eyes. "He's found us, just
as I knew he would. You couldn'