rock, still warm from those first flame spurts, and his big fingers searched deftly along the outer rim of the airlock. Both the inner and outer doors of the airlock slammed open. The girl was lying on the bed, her arms and legs having been bound hurriedly from strips of her torn skirt.

Now he halted in the doorway, shouted for the pirate to come out.

"I've got a gun, Frenchy!" he yelled. "Come out with your flippers in the air, if you want to live! You didn't think I'd leave the space-flyer so you could run it, did you?"

A roaring figure came out suddenly. Frenchy had a knife in one large crooked hand and was going to chance the ray. Rufus pulled the trigger of the flame-gun, but it had become jammed with silt in the sandy floor of the pool. He used it to parry the metal that darted down toward his heart.

Arms interlocked, they went hurtling from the airlock to the black table of lavalike rock. The smashing jar of collision wrenched their bodies apart. For a moment the pirate seemed about to flee, and Rufus would have let him go. Then the beady eyes fastened upon the space cruiser, and he came for Rufus swinging. One of them would go back to earth with the girl. Frenchy Logrieux didn't intend to spend the rest of his life as a castaway.

So the pirate came forward furiously, hacking the air before him with the long knife, and big Rufus Thallin backed slowly away. He was not fool enough to walk in close where Frenchy's snaking blade could find a vital spot. He was being backed up a slow incline to the edge of the precipitous spire where the pirate had been perched when they came. His footing narrowed to a mere ledge, with precarious depths to either side. Soon he would be able to retreat no more.

Glancing hurriedly about, he saw another parallel spire jutting over the gulf, some ten feet away. Poising quickly, Rufus leaped across the intervening gulf and landed catlike. Then he began to run down the incline toward the cruiser.

Frenchy Logrieux's blade was out of reach now, but he took a chance, poised for a moment, and hurled his weapon in a glittering streak. Expecting this move, young Rufus dragged his toe in the rugged slope, fell to his hands and knees. The blade clattered off into lower depths.

It is the unexpected that counts for most in a struggle. That was why Rufus Thallin spun around and again leaped the gulf between the twin glassy spires that overlooked the 

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