. So much
to be learned; so much to be done! And mine would have been the glory
and fame of it!"

He turned hesitantly, almost apologetically, toward Chet standing
motionless and unspeaking with the wonder of this turn of events.

"Should you be so fortunate as to survive," began Kreiss, "perhaps you
would be so kind--my name--I would not want it lost." He straightened
abruptly.

"Go!" he ordered. "Get as near as you can!" His feet were climbing
steadily up the slippery ascent.

* * * * *

The faintest breath of the gas warned Chet back. Almost infinitely
diluted, it still set him choking while the tears streamed down his
face. But he worked his way as near the ship as he dared, and he saw
through the tears that still blinded his stinging eyes the tall figure
of Kreiss as he reached the top.

A table of steaming mud was there, and Kreiss was sinking into it as he
struggled forward. At the center was a hot throat where fumes like a
breath from hell roared and choked with the strangling of its own gas.
The figure writhed as a whirl of green enveloped it, threw itself
forward. From one outstretched hand an object fell toward the throat;
its leafy wrapping was whipped sharply for an instant by the coughing
breath....

And then, where the hot blast had been, and the forming clouds and the
erupting mud, was a pillar of fire--a white flame that thundered into
the sky.

Straight and clean, like the sword of some guardian angel, it stood
erect--a line of dazzling light in a darkening sky. And the fumes of
green had vanished at its touch.

But Kreiss! Chet found himself running toward the fumerole. He must save
him, drag him back. Then he knew with a certainty that admitted of no
question that for Kreiss there was no help: that for this man of science
the laws of cause and effect were no longer operative on the plane of
Earth. The heat would have killed him, but the enveloping gas must have
reached him first. And he had sacrificed himself for what?--that he,
Chet, might reach the ship!... Before Chet's eyes was a silvery cylinder
whose closed port was plainly marked.

* * * * *

No gas now! No glint of green! The way was clear, and the slim figure of
Chet Bullard was checked in its rush toward a mound of mud and the body
of a man that lay next to a blasting column of flame; he turned instead
to throw himself through the clean air toward the ship that was