ed
them from the safety of the ship? The memory of that other menace,
half-seen among the rocks, was strong upon him.

"Stand back!" he shouted to Chet and the girl, and he raised his
pistol to send a charge of detonite into the unyielding mass. Here was
power to tear the clinging-stuff to atoms.

He felt Chet's body plunge upon him an instant before he fired, and
his pistol was knocked up and flew outward from his hand. He heard
the pilot's voice.

"Walt!" Chet was saying. "For God's sake come out of it! Are you
crazy? You might have wrecked that door-port so we never could have
fixed it; or the bullet could have gone on through to explode inside
the ship. Either way we would never get back: no leaky hull would ever
let us make the trip home!"

Chet was right: Harkness knew it in a moment. He knew the folly of
what he would have done, yet knew, too, that desperate measures were
needed and needed quickly. The eyes of a devil had held his own from
the darkness of the rocks, and the same rock wall came close to where
they stood. He was in command; it was up to him--

* * * * *

The moment of indecision ended as a mass of viscous fluid splashed
heavily against the ship. Harkness whirled about to face the rocks. He
was calm now and controlled, but under his quiet courage was a fear
that gripped him. A fear of what he should find! But the reality was
so far beyond any imagined terror as to leave him cold.

Above them and thirty feet away on a rocky ledge was a thing of
horror. Basilisk eyes in a hairy head; gray, stringy hairs; and the
fearful head ended in narrow, outthrust jaws, where more of the gray
hairs hung like moss from lips that writhed and curled and sucked at
the air with a whistling shrillness. Those jaws could crush a man to
pulp. And the head seemed huge until the body behind it came into
view.

The suddenness with which the great body rose showed the strength of
the beast. A prodigious sack, like black leather, with markings of
crimson and copper!--and the straggling, ropy hairs on it were
greenish-gray like the lustre of the rocks at its back.

It stood upright on great hairy legs. The eyes shot forward on
protruding antennae. The sack-like body flexed to bring the rear part
under and forward. It was aiming at them.

Harkness seized the slim figure of the girl who stood, mute with
horror, beside him. He threw her roughly to the ground, for the
meaning of the visco