ne of the bed-plates under it. The other massive metal sheet
he laid across the top.

The lower rim of the sun touched the horizon. A tremor ran through the
colossus. In frantic haste, racing against the flying seconds, Harley
clamped the two plates tight against the columnar tentacle with four
long hull-bolts from the Dart. He set the repellor in position on the
top bed-plate, and began to fasten it down.

He felt another tremor run through the stone column on which he was
squatting. With a rasping sound, one of the half-moon rock-curtains the
thing had for eyelids blinked open and shut. He shot the last bolt into
place and tightened it.

The stone claws, just behind which he had fastened the repellor, ground
savagely shut. The great tentacle began to lift, and carried him with
it--toward the chasm of a mouth. That chasm opened wide....

Harley straightened up and jumped for the ground. As he jumped, he
kicked the repellor control bar hard over.

There was a shrieking of wind as though all the hurricanes in the
universe were battling each other. He felt himself turned over and over,
buffeted, torn at, in a mad aerial whirlpool. The whirlpool calmed as
the abruptly created vacuum, caused by the monster's rapid drive upward,
passed after it into space. Far overhead there was one fleeting glimpse
of a pinpoint of dull opalescence reflecting the rays of the dying sun.
Then the pinpoint disappeared in fathomless space. With his gravity
regulator adjusted to the point where it almost neutralized his weight,
he fell slowly back toward the ground....

* * * * *

Almost immediately after he had landed in the darkness that blanketed
the surface of the planetoid, a big space yacht settled down near him. A
searchlight bored a hole in the blackness, to bathe him in cold light.
Down the beam came a band of men from Earth, pushing atomic cannon and
gazing apprehensively about them. In the lead was an elderly man with
the six-bar dollar-mark insignia of a business executive on his purple
tunic.

He hastened to Harley's side. Harley only dimly heard what he said.
Something to the effect that the man had been worried after selling the
fatal asteroid. Had got in touch with the Radivision Corporation and
learned that this call number was dead. Had come with men and big guns
to rescue him, if it wasn't too late, and take him back to Earth. Had
cruised for half an hour before locating him. "I've been