bull's-eye windows. Both his hands were at his hips—his hands gripping an old-fashioned bullet-projector and a Banning heat-gun, with muzzles leveled at my chest!

V

"So what are you going to do with me?" I demanded.

"Take it easy. Sit where you are." They had shoved me back into my chair at the instrument board. Over in a corner Alan still sat with his hands clasped between his knees, and his fingers working. Just a boy. He could not meet the glance I flung at him.

"Is Dr. Livingston dead?" I said. "If he isn't—Good Lord, are you going to let him just lie there?"

"Oh, he's dead all right," Duroh growled.

"You have no objection if I see, have you?"

"No. Go ahead."

"We'll go out by the lower door," Carruthers said impassively. "Keep your muzzle on him, Pete—I'm going down. Livingston said we'll use a portable spectroscope to locate the Xalite. It's in the base; I'll go rig it up."

"You better not open that base door too quickly," I warned. "If this atmosphere is wrong, in chemical content or pressure—kill us all here like rats in a trap."

"Don't you worry, Taine." From the head of the little incline stairway Carruthers grinned at me with his tight-lipped, ironic smile. "That's why you're alive. We realize you know more about a lot of things in this than we do."

Damnable cold-blooded villain. He waved his hand with jaunty irony at me as he vanished down the staircase. With Duroh's weapons alertly on me, I bent over the crumpled Dr. Livingston. He was dead, beyond question. For years he had been my best, almost my only, friend. There was a lump in my throat as I went back to my seat at the table.

"About this Xalite," Duroh said pleasantly. "In what form do we expect to find it? Pretty pure? Can you tell how pure it is with your instruments? If it's in a pretty pure state, we won't need so much, will we? Fifty pounds or so—to deal out to a panting world for all our lifetime and make us rich enough for any man's dreams."

"So you all three have decided to be murderers?" I retorted. "One of us I should have thought was enough—contaminating damn business—"

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