leap with hope. Outer space!--and
a short, straight escape to it! In a flash he saw how Ku Sui perhaps
had eluded him.

The Eurasian's prepared emergency exit would also be his!

He lost not a fraction of a second. Turning his glove controls to
maximum acceleration, he rose with a rush into the bore. Despite his
good aim the asteroid's centrifugal force threw him heavily into one
red-hot side. His heart went cold; would the fabric of the suit burn
through? No time for such worries--must make the frigid air
outside--fast--fast--never mind bumps--quick out--and must stay
conscious--_must_ stay conscious to exert repulsion against Earth!

Like a projectile Hawk Carse shot out of that tunnel of hell at a
tangent to the asteroid and in a direction away from Earth, and in an
instant the doomed body was far below him, and streaking faster and
ever faster to the annihilation now so near.

He fought to come out of his dizziness. Shaking his head, he glanced
back for sight of a minute, suit-clad figure. Had Ku Sui preceded him
through the emergency exit, his shape should be visible somewhere,
etched by the sunlight.

There was no sign of him.

Carse's eyes dropped to the asteroid. He saw it already miles below,
a breath-taking celestial object, a second sun, brilliant and
increasingly brilliant as it diminished over the watery plain waiting
to receive it. His mind saw the Eurasian, caught in the long corridor
to the dome, already dead on this last flight of his extraordinary
vehicle of space....

The end came at once. The sun was quickly a great, brilliant shooting
star, then a blinding smaller one: then its straight mad flight
through the heavens was over, and it was received in the waters of the
Atlantic Ocean and buried deep.

A cataclysmic burial. A titanic meteor, an incandescent, screaming
streak in the night--a cloud of billowing steam--a wall of water
rearing back from the strange grave of the asteroid, so far come from
its accustomed orbit around Mars.... The thought came to Carse that
Dr. Ku Sui had died as he lived, spectacularly, with a brilliance and
a tidal wave and an earthquake to disturb the lives of men....

And a sadness fell over the heart of the Hawk....

* * * * *

He roused from it in a moment. He felt heat! In the rush of events he
had not before noticed that his space-suit had started to burn from
the friction of his own passage through the atmosphere. Fortuna