ll of his new Blinco
Dart--that small but excellent quantity-production craft that had
entirely replaced the cumbersome space ships of a decade ago--and
screwed down the man-hole lid. Then, with his hand on the gravity bar,
he gazed out the rear panel, ready to throw the lever at the control
assistant's signal.

The move was unthinkingly, mechanically made. Too many times had he gone
through this process of being aimed by astronomical calculation, and
launched into the heavens, to be much stirred by the wonder of it. The
journey to Z-40 in the Dart was no more disquieting than, a century and
a half ago, before the United States had fused together into one vast
city, a journey from Chicago to Florida would have been in one of the
inefficient gasoline-driven vehicles of that day.

All his thoughts were on his destination, and on a wonder as to what
could be the nature of the thing that dwelt there.

He had just come from the sanitarium where the man who'd bought Z-40
before him was recovering from nervous exhaustion. He'd gone there to
try to get first hand information about the creature the executive at
the Celestial Developments Company had talked so vaguely of. And the
tale the convalescent had told him of the thing on the asteroid was as
fantastic as it was sketchy.

A tremendous, weirdly manlike creature looming in the dim night--a thing
that seemed a part of the planetoid itself, fashioned from the very dirt
and rock from which it had risen--a thing immune to the ray-pistol, that
latest and deadliest of man-made small-arms--a thing that moved like a
walking mountain and stared with terrible, stony eyes at its prey! That
was what the fellow said he had faintly made out in the darkness before
his nerves had finally given way.

He had impressed Harley as being a capable kind of a person, too; not at
all the sort to distort facts, nor to see imaginary figures in the
night.

There was that matter of the stone splinter, however, which certainly
argued that the wan, prematurely white-haired fellow was a little
unbalanced, and hence not to be believed too implicitly. He'd handed it
to Harley, and gravely declared it to be a bit of the monster's flesh.

"Why, it's only a piece of rock!" Harley had exclaimed before he could
check himself.

"Did you ever see rock like it before?"

Turning it over in his hands, Harley had been forced to admit that he
never had. It was of the texture and roughness of granite, but more