the ground. His huge
biceps tensed and the scrawny scientist was in the air, up and above the
bowed head, then let down gently to rest across the broad shoulders of
Luke Fenton. Fuller hung there, bent double by the immense weight of
him, crushed to painful contact with the taut muscles that carried the
strain.

On Earth, Fuller might have tipped the scales at a scant one hundred and
thirty pounds; now his sagging body was a load in excess of seven
hundredweight. With that load upon him, and glorying in the effort it
cost, Luke staggered on toward the triple red glow, which, even in the
blinding whiteness of the snowfall, marked the location of the columns
of fire.

That all feeling had left his limbs in the deep-biting cold meant
nothing; that his lungs were near bursting under the terrific strain
meant even less. Luke Fenton had found a man. One he would fight for,
not against. And, miraculously, he had found himself.

* * * * *

After that there was a blur of interminable torture. Reeling and
stumbling, his leg and back muscles shot through with stabbing pain as
the frost worked slowly upward, Luke plodded doggedly ahead. An
occasional shout came from far behind where the guards still searched
the rocky plateau.

Across his great shoulders, Luke's burden was a dead weight, of
corpselike rigidity and stillness. Yet Luke clung to it tenaciously,
disposing the drooping leaden limbs as comfortably as possible by the
judicious spreading of his own brawny arms.

Fuller, he was sure, had not long to live in any event. X.C. had
already progressed to such a point that it was hardly possible he could
recover. And yet, these smart guys Luke always had detested--the doctors
and surgeons and such--they might be able to do something for the poor
devil. Anyway, he determined, he'd get the scientist to his friends dead
or alive, and he'd see to it that they treated him right. If they
didn't....

The red glow was suddenly very bright and a silvery metallic shape
loomed up before him in the whiteness. An ethership! Luke tried to call
out but his bellowing voice was gone; only faint gurgling sounds came
from his throat. He pushed forward with a savage summoning of his last
ounce of energy and Fuller's weight was that of a mastodon upon him. The
curved hull of the vessel was overhead when he slipped and fell to one
knee in the thick carpet of snow.

Luke saw them then, a dozen stranger