flame of a short-circuit created a gigantic arc. It died. The place was full of smoke, and something small ran feebly across the small space that Wentworth could see, and fell, and kicked feebly, and was still. Wentworth could hear a machine come to a jolting stop. And crouching there fiercely, he waited for more antagonists.

None came. The fumes drifted out the cave-mouth. Then he could see the Thing on the floor. Clad in a weirdly constructed space-suit, the creature he had knocked over was not human and looked very tired. It was dead. Next he saw an almost typical tight-beam projector, linked with heavy cables to a scanning device.

He saw a model—all of five feet high—of the city he and Haynes had tried to reach. The model was of unbelievable delicacy and perfection. But the scanning system now was focused on a metal object which was a miniature Thing with claws and jaws and armor.

It was two feet long, and there was a cable control by which its movements could be directed. A solidity which was controlled by that ingenious mechanical toy could dig canals, or gather the crop from the tops of skit-trees—when enlarged in the projection to stand a hundred feet high at the shoulder—or it could tear apart a spaceship as a terrier rends a rat.

There was more. Much more. But there had been only the one small Inhabitant, who wore a space-suit on his own planet. And he was dead. Haynes' voice came from the flier at the cave-mouth. "Wentworth! What's happened? Are you alive? What's up?"

Wentworth went out, still in a savage mood. He wanted to see how the Galloping Cow had withstood the attack. What he had seen last looked bad.

It was bad. The Galloping Cow was a carcass. Her engines were not too badly smashed, but her outer shell was scrap-iron, her frame was twisted wreckage, and there was no faintest hope that they could repair her.

"And—I'm engaged to be married when we get back," said Haynes, white-faced. "We'll never get back in that."

Less than a month later, though, the Galloping Cow did head for home. Haynes, unwittingly, had made it possible. Examination of the solidity-projector revealed its principles, and Haynes—trying forlornly to make a joke—suggested that he model a statuette of the last Inhabitant to be projected a mile or two high above the skit-tree plantations now forever useless.

But he was commissioned to model something else entirely, and in his exuberance his fancy wandered afar. But McRea dourly 

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