nst
something--his kit, slung just above his waist. There were handkerchiefs
in the kit, he recalled suddenly. And he remembered what the guide had
said about Aurigean air.

He tugged the kit open, fumbled and found a handkerchief. He zipped open
the closure of his helmet and tilted the helmet back. He brought up the
handkerchief, and gave himself over to the spasm.

* * * * *

He was startled by a hoarse boom, as if someone had scraped the strings
of an amplified bull fiddle. He looked around, blinking, and discovered
that the sound was coming from the Aurigean. The monster, with its
tentacles tightly curled around the tip of its body, was scuttling into
the corridor. As Weaver watched in confusion, it vanished, and a sheet
of metal slid across the doorway.

More boomings came shortly from a source Weaver finally identified as a
grille over the control panels. He took a step that way, then changed
his mind and turned back toward the airlock.

Just as he reached the nearer airlock door, the farther one swung open
and an instant torrent of wind thrust him outward.

Strangling, Weaver grabbed desperately at the door-frame as it went by.
He swung with a sickening thud into the inner wall, but he hung on and
pulled himself back inside.

The force of the wind was dropping rapidly; so was the air pressure.
Ragged black blotches swam before Weaver's eyes. He fumbled with his
helmet, trying to swing it back over his head; but it stubbornly
remained where it was. The blow when he struck the airlock wall, he
thought dimly--it must have bent the helmet so that it would not fit
into its grooves.

He forced himself across the room, toward the faint gleam of the
Aurigean control board--shaped like a double horseshoe it was, around
the two lattice-topped stools, and bristling with levers, knobs and
sliding panels. One of these, he knew, controlled the airlock. He
slapped blindly at them, pulling, pushing, turning as many as he could
reach. Then the floor reeled under him, and, as he fell toward it,
changed into a soft gray endless mist....

* * * * *

When he awoke, the airlock door was closed. His lungs were gratefully
full of air. The Aurigean was nowhere to be seen; the door behind which
he had disappeared was still closed.

Weaver got up, stripped off his spacesuit, and, by hammering with the
sole of one of the boots, managed to straighten out the dent in