m three horrible minutes of dodging and bounding to reach the
weapons again. He snatched at the revolver, missed, made another
desperate grab as he dropped to the rug; the second time he had it. He
crawled under a chest which stood twenty inches off the floor. Luckily
the alien was trying to catch him, not slay him, for it could long since
have smeared him into jelly with a piece of furniture for a bludgeon.

Feverishly he loaded the chambers of the Colt. For a moment his
scattered wits could not recollect just how to operate this special
weapon. Then he remembered.

The fingers of the monster, sausage-sized and disgusting in their parody
of humanity, came groping beneath the chest. Pinkham wormed back and
came up behind it, staring into the red eyes.

With a concentration of power that he had not known he could summon, he
shot out from behind the chest and vaulted onto the top of his enormous
desk.

The alien, lips curling, straightened till its head brushed the ceiling.
It reached out for him.

In the last split second, Pink had a vision of himself, and instead of a
glorious gesture, it seemed to him suddenly that he was making an awful
ass of himself. Like a man before a firing squad thumbing his nose....

Nevertheless, he aimed the Colt full into the gargantuan face before
him, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER XIII

The dawn-man, a thing like a wet rat, bared its teeth at the
dinosaur.... The Cro-Magnon faced a horde of hulking Neanderthals with a
grin.... The Crusader stood with a broken sword and brandished the hilt
at the charging Saracens.... The Apache drew his knife to fight a
double-troop armed with carbines.... The American flung his empty M-1 in
the faces of forty Japanese ... _toujours le beau geste_. Captain
Pinkham, standing in his cabin aboard the spaceship _Elephant's Child_
adrift in Star System Ninety, leaned forward and pulled the trigger to
the two-century-old, out-moded, laughable popgun of a Colt .44 firing
once and twice and again and again into the face of the bronze-yellow
space-dwelling giant.

The being loomed over him, and a scream like the death-wail of a meteor
lanced into his eardrums and made him gasp with anguish. He pumped the
last slug into the enemy and launched himself side-long, without much
hope of landing anywhere but in a bushel-sized palm. He was actually
surprised when he found himself on the rug. He scrambled for cover, but
before he reached it, it dawned