heavily shot with quartz, or tridymite than any other granite he'd ever
seen. It had a dull opalescent sheen, too. But it was rock, all right.

"It's a piece of the thing's hide," the man had told him. "It flaked off
when it tried to pry open the man-hole cover of ray Dart. A moment after
that I got Radivision arc directions from London Field, aimed my sights,
and shot for Earth. It was a miracle I escaped."

"But surely your ray-pistol--" Harley had begun, preserving a discreet
silence about the man's delusion concerning the stone splinter.

"I tell you it was useless as a toy! Never before have I seen any form
of life that could stand up against a ray-gun. But _this_ thing _did_!"

This was another statement Harley had accepted with a good deal of
reservation. He had felt sure the weapon the man had used had a leak in
the power chamber, or was in need of recharging, or something of the
kind. For it had been conclusively proved that all organic matter
withered and burned away under the impact of the Randchron ray.

Nevertheless, discounting heavily the convalescent's wild story, only a
fool would have clung to a conviction that the menace on Z-40 was a
trivial one. There was _something_ on that asteroid, something larger
and more deadly than Harley had ever heard of before in all his
planetary wanderings.

He squared his shoulders. Whatever it was, he was about to face it, man
against animal. He was reasonably certain his ray-gun would down
anything on two legs or ten. If it didn't--well, there was nothing else
that could; and he'd certainly provide a meal for the creature, assuming
it ate human flesh....

A mechanic tapped against the rear view panel to recall his wandering
attention. The control assistant held up his hands, fingers outspread,
to indicate that there were ten seconds left.

Harley's hand went to his throat, where was hung a locket--a lovely but
useless trinket of the kind once much worn by Earth women--and his
fingers tightened tenderly on it. It had belonged to Beatrice 3W28W12's
great-great-grandmother, and Beatrice had given it to him as a token.

"With luck, my dear," he whispered aloud. "With luck...."

There was a slight vibration. He threw the gravity bar over to the first
notch. Earth dropped, plummet-like, away from him. He pushed the bar to
the limit leg; and, at a rate of hundreds of miles a second, was
repelled from Earth toward Z-40, and the thing that skulked there.

*