radio. "They're coming fast. Stand by and I'll try to think of something."

He streaked up to the roof of the icy chamber, sailed fast toward the far end.

And suddenly he did think of something—something so simple it seemed foolish.

"Listen!" he yelled to the radio. "Turn your ships around. Sit down on the ice! Give your rockets half throttle and let gravity pull you down as the ice melts under you. It'll take a long time but I may hold 'em off till—"

A flash of white lightning streaked across his view plate. The ship steamed, sweat formed little beads on Ricker's forehead, ran into his eyes. One was diving in front of him. Ricker squeezed his trigger, saw the ship flash into floating dust before him. He saw another coming down from above.

With a quick jerk of the wheel, he zoomed up and over, wheeled into a swift Immelman and dived.

The buildings, the field, the standing planes below whirled, surged up to meet him like a nightmare of falling.

He pulled out of the dive not fifty feet from the tops of the buildings, zoomed away again with the planes hot on his tail. They'd followed him down, were streaming after him like a swarm of hornets.

For the next ten minutes those below witnessed the weirdest dog fight in all flying history. There wasn't room to make a running battle of it. It was dive, zoom, streak from one end of the cave to the other like hawks fighting in a cage. Ricker twisted into every contortion his straining jets allowed. And still those ships closed in relentlessly, often striking one of their own number—which closeness of battle was Ricker's only ally. The ships closed in slowly, inexorably formed a ring of murderous heat around him.

It was a losing fight. Ricker knew it. He couldn't elude them forever. One well-timed blast and he'd go down in a swirl of ashes and smoke. And his constant fighting the controls to avoid the ships, to avoid crashing the walls and the roof, was wearing his arms to dead aching weights.

The ships tried strategy. They divided, Ricker saw, into five groups, waited for him at each corner of the chamber while the others gave chase. And these groups closed in with each wild dive he made.

Soon they would have him trapped between them. Well, the game was about up. It was a matter of minutes now. He might 

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