the old Western axiom, that one good man with a rifle was worth four good men with revolvers. He took the big sporting gun from Johnson, and, thrusting his ray pistol into the front of his shirt where it would be handy, walked purposefully at the next door. He had a feeling about this one.

He wasn't wrong. Three aliens grouped around a table, bending above some chart or mathematical calculation, turned and rose as he stepped into the doorway. Two of them he blasted before they had glimpsed him, and the third he took in the face with a heavy slug just as the beast was opening his mouth to shout or challenge. The rifle echoed like artillery in the small room, and Trace thought with a momentary despair that it had likely been heard all through the ship. He stepped over the twitching corpses and went on.

This time the door opened before he had neared it, and a green man, ready and tensed, stood on the threshold with a gun in his big fist. Trace, caught for an instant unawares, went to his knees and jerked up his pistol; it shot its deadly thin stream of force on the heels of the alien's, and he saw it strike the broad chest and begin to disintegrate the whole being. The Graken's shot had missed.

Well, it had missed him, Trace realized, as he heard the sharp gasps behind him. He looked and saw Kinkaid's headless body topple over between Barbara and Jane. It proved the incredible depth of the women's feeling for this fight and this terrible problem, for neither of them screamed....

Shoulder to shoulder Trace and Bill Blacknight went through the room and their pistols' beams snaked out without sound together, as before them the control panels and intricate machinery of the pilot cubicle appeared behind three tall green-skinned Graken. Slough's revolver bellowed hoarsely behind them. Bill felt a tug at his coat, and later discovered that a great patch of cloth had been burned away by the enemy's rays. Johnson, half-crazed with anger now and gone quite berserk, plunged past them as they fired at the aliens and the last spitting stream from a pistol caught him in the belly and burst his body asunder.

They were in the control room, the six who had come this far alive, and the door through which they had leaped would not close. Bill fumbled wildly at the jamb, at the edge that was flush with the wall, and then Slough said, "The bodies! Roll away the bodies!"

Hafnagel and Bill took unpleasantly blasted corpses by the heels and dragged them out of the cubicle; then, having cleared 

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