ing.

They made the door, waited outside while the firing within continued.
When at last it was still within, he peered around the corner of the
room. She lay in a crumpled heap in the corner; quietly he re-entered,
picked her up awkwardly. Through the thin, resistant folds of the
spacesuit, he could feel the warmth of her, but could not tell whether
the heart still beat or not. They would have to take her to one of the
ships.

Her limp form was held tightly under his good arm as Nat hurried down
the main tunnel. Digger apparently realized the seriousness of the
situation, for he received impressions of "must hurry" from the beast
and another creature, looking much like him, surrounded by small
creatures of the same type, trapped in a crevice. "Aren't you a bit
premature, old fellow," he chided.

Halfway there, the globes met them again. The things were not singing;
from their many eyes poured a fierce, angry blue light. They rolled
with a determination that frightened him. Yet he strode on, until they
were barely a foot away.

"Jump, Digger!"

The spheres stopped short, reversed their direction toward the little
group at a furious rate, flinging out long, whip-like tentacles. One
wrapped itself around Nat's ankle, drew him down. He shifted the limp
form over to his shoulder, slipped out his heat-rod. Quickly the
tentacle was severed. But now others took their place; he continued
firing at them, making each bolt tell, but the numbers were too great.

Digger sprang into action, rending the globes with those claws that
were capable of tearing the hulls of spaceships. But tentacles lashed
around him from the rear, snaked about him so that he was helpless.

The girl was slipping off Nat's shoulder. He could not raise the stump
of an arm to balance her; it was stiff and useless. He stopped firing
long enough to make the shift, even as the spheres attacked again. The
bolts had put out the lights in fully half of the marauders but the
others came on unafraid.

Nat straddled Digger's writhing body, held the spacehound motionless
between his legs. At short range, he seared off the imprisoning
tentacles, knowing that it would take far more than a heat-bolt to
damage the well-nigh impregnable creature. He swooped the dog up under
his good arm and fled from the madly-pursuing spheres, thanking
nameless deities that the gravity here permitted such herculean feats.
The spheres rolled faster, he soon found, than he could jum