ily the duty man on watch, and its
tracker was shaken off course. When it jiggled back into line it was no
longer the efficient eye-in-the-sky it had been, though its tenders were
not to realize that for an important minute or two.

While the ship, now out of control, sped in dizzy whirls toward Topaz,
engines fought blindly to stabilize, to re-establish their functions.
Some succeeded, some wobbled in and out of the danger zone, two failed.
And in the control cabin three dead men spun in prisoning seats.

Dr. James Ruthven, blood bubbling from his lips with every shallow
breath he could draw, fought the stealthy tide of blackness which crept
up his brain, his stubborn will holding to rags of consciousness,
refusing to acknowledge the pain of his fatally injured body.

The orbiting ship was on an erratic path. Slowly the machines were
correcting, relays clicking, striving to bring it to a landing under
auto-pilot. All the ingenuity built into a mechanical brain was now
centered in landing the globe.

It was not a good landing, in fact a very bad one, for the sphere
touched a mountain side, scraped down rocks, shearing away a portion of
its outer bulk. But the mountain barrier was now between it and the base
from which the missiles had been launched, and the crash had not been
recorded on that tracking instrument. So far as the watchers several
hundred miles away knew, the warden in the sky had performed as
promised. Their first line of defense had proven satisfactory, and there
had been no unauthorized landing on Topaz.

In the wreckage of the control cabin Ruthven pawed at the fastenings of
his sling-chair. He no longer tried to suppress the moans every effort
tore out of him. Time held the whip, drove him. He rolled from his seat
to the floor, lay there gasping, as again he fought doggedly to remain
above the waves--those frightening, fast-coming waves of dark faintness.

Somehow he was crawling, crawling along a tilted surface until he gained
the well where the ladder to the lower section hung, now at an acute
angle. It was that angle which helped him to the next level.

He was too dazed to realize the meaning of the crumpled bulkheads. There
was a spur of bare rock under his hands as he edged over and around
twisted metal. The moans were now a gobbling, burbling, almost
continuous cry as he reached his goal--a small cabin still intact.

For long moments of anguish he paused by the chair there, afraid that he