cellate diaphragm of the G.C. transmitter tore across from its
violence and Thorn cursed bitterly. There was no way, now, of
signaling....

A second racking crash as a second pellet flashed its tiny green
flame. Kreynborg was using a pocket-gun, one of those small terrible
weapons which shoot a projectile barely larger than the graphite of a
lead pencil, but loaded with a fraction of a milligram of hexynitrate.
Two hundred charges would feed automatically into the bore as the
trigger was pressed.

Thorn gazed desperately about for weapons. There was nothing in sight.
To gain the outside world he had to pass before the doorway through
which the bullets had come.... And suddenly Thorn seized the
code-writer and the device which transmitted that code as a series of
unearthly noises which the world was taking for Martian speech. He
swung the two machines before the door in a temporary barrier.
Whatever else Kreynborg might be willing to destroy, he would not
shoot into them!

Thorn leaped madly past the door as Kreynborg roared with rage again.
He paused only to hurl a chair at the two essential machines, and as
they dented and toppled, he fled through the door and away.

* * * * *

Sylva peered anxiously at him from behind a huge boulder. He raced
toward her, expecting every second to hear the spitting of Kreynborg's
pocket-gun. With the continuous-fire stud down, the little gun would
shoot itself empty in forty-five seconds, during which time Kreynborg
could play it upon him like a hose that spouted death. But Thorn had
done the hundred yards in eleven seconds, years before. He bettered
his record now. The first of the little green flashes came when he was
no more than ten yards from the boulder which sheltered Sylva. The
tiny pellet had missed him by inches. Three more, and he was safe from
pursuit.

"But we've got to get away!" he panted. "He can shoot gas here and get
us again! He can cover four hundred yards with gas, and more than that
with guns."

They fled down a tiny water-course, midget figures in an infinity of
earth and sky, scurrying frenziedly from a red slug-like thing that
lay askew in a mountain valley. Far away and high above hung the
war-planes of the United Nations. Big ones and little ones, hovering
in hundreds about the outside of the dome of force they could neither
penetrate nor understand.

A quarter of a mile. Half a mile. There was no sign from Kreynborg