st the control board near him.

* * * * *

He sprang for it, grasped it as a club, and returned to the glass
bell. Raising his arms high, he brought the thick metal bar down on
the glass with all his strength.

With a force that almost wrenched his arms from their sockets, the bar
rebounded from the glass bell, leaving it uncracked.

"Unbreakable!" groaned Brand.

Desperately he tried again, whirling the bar high over his head and
bringing it smashing down. The result was the same as before as far as
breaking the bell was concerned. But--a little trickle of crushed rock
came from around the bolts in the slab to which the bell was fastened.

A third time be brought the bar down. The glass bell sagged a bit sway
from the slab....

He had no chance for more assaults on it. The nearest Rogans had
leaped for him. Slimy arms were coiling around him, while the
loathsome sucker-disks tore at his unprotected face and throat.

Savagely Brand lashed out with the bar. It caved in a pair of the
long, skinny legs, bringing a bloated round head down within reach. He
smashed it with the bar, exulting grimly as the blow crumpled bone and
flesh almost down to the little mouth which was yet carmine from its
recent feeding.

The process seemed a sound one to Brand, unable as he was to reach the
Rogans' heads that towered six feet above his own. Methodically,
swinging the bar with the weight of his body behind it, he repeated
the example. First a crash of the bar against a pair of legs, then the
crushing in of the Rogan's head when he toppled with agonized squeals
to the floor.

Again and again he crushed the life out of a Rogan with his one-two
swing of the deadly bar. They were thinning down, now. They were
wavering in their charges against the comparatively insignificant
being from another planet who was defending himself so fiercely.

* * * * *

Finally one of their number turned and ran toward an exit, waving his
four arms and adding his high-pitched alarms to the incessant ringing
of the gongs and shrieks of the warning siren up under the roof. The
rest rushed the Earthman in a body.

Steadily, almost joyfully, Brand fought on. He had expected to be
annihilated by one of the Rogan shock-tubes long before now; but as
yet there was no sign of any. Either these Rogan workmen were not
privileged to carry the terrible things, or they were too occupied to
think o