communicator emitted babbling sounds. Shoutings. Incoherent outcries. From the ship, of course. There were sudden, whining crashes, electronic cannon going off at a panic-stricken rate. Then a ghastly crashing sound, and silence. The flier zoomed until Haynes and Wentworth could see. They paled. Wentworth uttered a raging cry.

The Galloping Cow had landed. Her ports were open and men had emerged. But now a Thing had attacked the ship with a ruthless, irresistible ferocity. It was bigger than the Galloping Cow. It stood a hundred feet high at the shoulder. It was armored and possessed of prodigious jaws and gigantic teeth. It was all the nightmares of mechanistic minds rolled into one.

It must have materialized from nothingness, because nothing so huge could have escaped Wentworth's search. But as Wentworth first looked at it, the incredible jaws closed on the ship's frame and bit through the tough plates of beryllium steel as if they had been paper. It tore them away and flung them aside.

A mainframe girder offered resistance. With an irresistible jerk, the Thing tore it free. And then it put its claws into the very vitals of the Galloping Cow and began to tear the old spaceship apart.

The crewmen spilled out and fled. The Thing snapped at one as he went but returned to its unbelievable destruction. Someone heaved a bomb into its very jaws, and it exploded, and the Thing seemed not to notice.

Wentworth seized the controls of the flier from Haynes. He dived, not for the ship, but for the space between the ship and the mountains. He flung the small craft into crazy, careening gyrations in that space.

And then the communicator shrieked with clacking static. The flier passed through the beam, but Wentworth flung it back in. He plunged toward the mountains. He lost the beam, and found it again, and lost it and found it.

"There!" he said, choking with rage. "Down from the top of that cliff. There's a hole—a cave-mouth. The beam's coming from there!"

He plunged the flier for the opening, and braked with monstrous jetting that sent rocket-fumes blindingly and chokingly into the tunnel. The flier hit, and Wentworth scrambled to the forepart of the little ship and leaped to the cliff-opening against which it bumped. Then he ran into the opening, his flame-pistol flaring before him.

There was a blinding flash inside. The blue-white 

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