l run into trouble
enough without help from you."

The moondog drooped from disappointment. With Charley, any emotion
always reached the ultimate absurdity. He was a flowing, flexible
phantom of translucent color and radiance. But now the colors faded
like gaudy rags in caustic solution. Charley whined as Denver went
through the grotesque ritual of donning space helmet and zipping up
his glass cloth and metal foil suiting before he dared venture
outside. Charley even tried to help by pouring himself through the
stale air to hold open the locker where the tool-belts and holstered
heat guns were kept.

Space suiting bulged with internal pressure as Denver slid through the
airlock and left the ship behind. Walking carefully against the
treachery of moonweak gravity, he made cautious way up the slope
toward the clustered buildings. Footing was bad, with the feeling of
treading upon brittle, glassy surfaces and breaking through to bury
his weighted shoes in inches of soft ash. A small detour was necessary
to avoid upthrusting pinnacles of lavarock. In the shadow of these
outcroppings he paused to let his eyes adjust to the brilliance of
sunlight.

A thin pencil-beam of light stabbed outward from behind the nearer
building. Close at hand, one of the lava-needles vanished in soundless
display of mushrooming explosion. Sharp, acrid heat penetrated even
the insulating layers of suit. A pressure-wave of expanding gas
staggered him before it dissipated.

Denver flung himself instinctively behind the sheltering rocks. Prone,
he inched forward to peer cautiously through a V-cleft between two
jagged spires. Heat-blaster in hand, he waited events.

Again the beam licked out. The huddle of lava-pinnacles became a core
of flaming destruction. Half-molten rock showered Denver's precarious
refuge. He ducked, unhurt, then thrust head and gun-arm above the
barricade.

* * * * *

Two dark figures, running awkwardly, detached themselves from the
huddled bulk of buildings. Like leaping, fantastic shadows, they
scampered toward the mounds of deep shadow beneath the ridge. The
route took them away from Denver, making aim difficult. He fired
twice, hurriedly. Missed. But near misses because he had not focused
for such range.

By the time he could reset the weapon, the scurrying figures had
disappeared into the screening puddles of shadow. Denver tried to
distinguish them against the blackness, but it lay