naled from below.

* * * * *

His first step carried him, slipping and sprawling awkwardly, across a
rocky slope white with the rime of carbon dioxide frost. He came to his
feet and turned once to wave toward the ship where he knew Spud O'Malley
must be watching from a lookout. Then, moving cautiously, to learn the
gage of his own strength in this world of diminished weights, he started
down.

Rough going, Chet found; the wall of this great throat had not hardened
without showing signs of its tortured coughing. But Chet learned to
judge distance, and he found that a fifty-foot chasm was a trifle to be
crossed in one leap; huge boulders, whose molten sides had frozen as
they ran and dripped, could be surmounted by the spring of his leg
muscles that could throw him incredibly through the air. And always he
went downward toward the place where the lights had flashed.

They came once more. He had descended a thousand feet, he was
estimating, when the black igneous rocks blazed blindingly with a
reflected light like that of a thousand suns.

Another hundred feet below, down a precipitous slope, was a broad table
of rock. He saw it in the instant before he threw one metal-clad arm
across the eye-piece of his helmet to shut out the glare. And he saw, in
that fraction of a second, a moving figure, another like himself, clad
in an armored suit whose curves and fine-woven mesh caught the light in
a million of sparkling flames.

It was Haldgren, he told himself; and there was something that came
chokingly into his throat at the thought. That lonely figure--one tiny
dot of life on a bleak and lifeless stage! It was pitiful, this undying
effort to signal, to let his own world know that he still lived.

* * * * *

Chet did not put it into coherent words, but there was an overwhelming
emotion that was part pity and part pride. He was suddenly glad and
thankful to belong to a race of men who could carry on like this--who
never said die. And, as the glare winked out, he threw himself
recklessly down that last slope and brought up in a huddle at the feet
of the one who had started back in affright. There was one metal-cased
hand that went in a helpless gesture to the throat; the figure, all
silvery white in the dim Earth-glow, staggered back against a wall of
rock; only by inches did it miss a fall from the precipice edge where
the rock platform ended.

From the flo