that seethed with a brew from the Pit itself.

There had been pines in that valley, and firs towering hundreds of feet in the air. They were living torches now, half seen through a whirling chaos of flame. It billowed as if the very gases that burned were tortured in the burning. The black-red of smoke-choked flames parted at times to show a deadlier white light below—a white, glaring heat in the heart of this gigantic, furnace—a scintillant, quivering horror on which Danny fixed the cross hairs of his sights as he rode his screaming meteor down into the pit.

T

"Bats out o' hell!" And now the brood was returning, it must have seemed. But beneath them, as they passed, that vivid whiteness went dead. Yet before it changed Danny saw unbelievable things—pools of molten rock, glaring white through the smoke.

Up and out at the end of the valley! And Danny gasped for breath even in the shelter of his cabin's insulated walls. And, used as he was to the red menace that they fought, he went sick at sight of a message that spelled itself beside his controls.

"Ship number six down. Failed to come out." It was signed with the name of the squadron commander who had followed where he led.

And the valley! For five miles they had laid a blanket of non-combustible gases. For five minutes, perhaps, their course could be seen. And at the end of that time it was as it had been before, and the flames raged on unchecked.

His own Chief's number flashed before him; then a message that clicked across his scanning plate:

"O'Rourke! Get out of that hole! Nitrogen won't touch it; we can't pour in enough. It's the same all along the line. We'll have to break it up—smother it one part at a time. Have you tried your sound dampener?"

And Danny O'Rourke had the grace to blush even through the flush that the fire's breath had given his face. "Forgot it!" he shouted into his voice sender. "Forgot the ship had the little doodad on it!"

The Chief responded audibly. "You didn't forget to go first into that doorway to hell," he said drily. "You fool Irishman, go back down and try the thing; give the 'little doodad' a chance!"

Once more the red ship fell swiftly under Danny's hand. As before, the valley yawned like the living threat of a volcano in eruption. But this time, 

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