int-blank, and there was, of course, no need to take either gravity or
air resistance into account.

The pellets of the shotgun-like charge that blasted out from the gun were
small, needle-shaped, and heavy. They were oriented point-forward by the
magnetic field along the barrel of the weapon. Of the hundreds in each
charge fired, only a few penetrated the spacesuits of the targets, but
those few were enough. The powerful drug in the needle-pointed head of
each went into the bloodstream of the target.

Each man felt an itching sensation. He had less than two seconds to think
about it before unconsciousness overtook him and he slumped nervelessly.

The man with the gun ran across the intervening space quickly, his body
only a few degrees from the horizontal, and his toes paddling rapidly to
propel him over the rough rock.

He braked himself to a halt and slapped air patches over the area where
his charges had struck the men's suits, sealing the tiny air leaks, and,
at the same time, driving more of the tiny needles into their skins. They
would be out for a long time.

Neither of them had yet fallen to the ground; that would take several
minutes under this low gravity. He left them to drop and headed toward the
open air lock.

This was what he had been waiting for all those nineteen days in
cataleptic hypnosis. He couldn't have cut his way in from the outside; he
had had to wait until it was opened, and that time would come only when
the supply ship came.

Once in the air lock, he touched the control stud that would close the
outer door, pump air into the waiting room, and open the inner door. Here
was his greatest point of danger--greater, even, than the danger of coming
to the planetoid, or the danger of waiting nineteen days for the coming of
the supply ship. If the ones who remained within suspected
anything--anything at all!--then his chances of coming out of this alive
were practically nil.

But there was no reason why they should suspect. They should think that
the man coming in was one of their own. The radio contact between the men
outside had been limited to a few millimicrowatts of power--necessarily,
since radio waves of very small wattage can be decoded at tremendous
distances in open space. The men inside the planetoid certainly should not
have been able to pick up any more than the beginning of the conversation,
before it had been cut off by solid rock.

It was a high-speed air lock. Unlike the so