swooped up in front of him, and the sunlight washed briefly over its
desolate buildings, he looked hard for a shape moving amongst them,
without success. Doubtless the Eurasian was well inside by now.

The job of getting into the dome was a hazardous one. About every
thirty seconds the asteroid described a complete rotation, making the
rim turn at a speed of half a mile a second, and that made the task of
entering extremely dangerous to a man whose only protection was the
metal and fabric of a space-suit. Misjudgment would either rip the
suit or dash him to instant death. He had to slip cleanly down through
the jagged tear in the dome, planning his swoop accurately to the
fraction of a second.

Never cooler, the Hawk made it. Building a parallel speed equal to
that of the rotating dome, he followed it over in a dizzy whirl; and
as the rent came below he shot curving down and in with sufficient
precision, and at once swiftly adjusted his gravity to offset the
asteroid's great centrifugal force.

* * * * *

For alternating fifteen-second periods the sunlight filled the dome
and its buildings; and on the tail of the first of these, even as the
sable tide swept all vision from him, the Hawk arrived at the door of
one wing of the central building. He had not seen Ku Sui, and he had
no time for exploration, but he did have a hunch as to where the
Eurasian had gone, and he followed that hunch. A silent, giant-gray
thing in the black silence of the corridor, grim, intent and seeming
irresistible, he swept along it; and every second he knew that a
raygun might spit from where it had been waiting in ambush to puncture
his suit and kill him. For whether or not Ku Sui was aware that he was
being tracked by his old, bitter foe, Carse did not know.

The asteroid plunged down faster and faster. Earth's atmosphere, with
all its perils of friction, coming ever closer, and the great bosom of
the planet lying waiting to receive and bury the rock hurtling towards
it. Throughout most of the leagues of space that asteroid had tracked
on its master's diverse errands, and in many distant places the trails
of Hawk Carse and Ku Sui had crossed and left blood and crossed again;
and now those three--asteroid, Eurasian and the Hawk--were drawn once
more together for the spectacular and epic climax, now only minutes
away. No power in the universe was to stop the plunge of the asteroid;
it remained to be seen how