ed through the heavens!

He went to the spot where he had left his Sco drill, and a further
evidence of the thing's cold blooded ferocity was revealed. The
intricate mechanism had been wrenched into twisted pieces. The drums
were battered in and the flexible hose lengths torn apart in shreds. The
inventor himself couldn't have put it in working order again.

He was hopelessly trapped. He had no means of fighting the colossus. He
had no way of escaping into space, nor of returning to Earth and trying
to raise a loan that would allow him to come back here with men and
atomic guns. He hadn't even a way of intrenching himself in the ground
against the next attack.

For an instant his hair prickled in a flash of the blind panic that had
seized him a few hours before. With a tremendous effort of will he
fought it down. This--the destruction of his precious Dart and
drill--was the result of one siege of insensate fear. If he succumbed to
another one he might well dash straight into the arms of death. He sank
to the ground and rested his chin on his fist, concentrating all his
intellect on the hopeless problem that faced him.

The surface of Z-40 was many square miles in extent. But, if he tried to
hide himself, he knew it was only a question of time before he would be
hunted down. The asteroid was too tiny to give him indefinite
concealment. Flight, then, was futile.

But if he didn't try to conceal himself in the sparse forest lands, it
meant that he must stay to face the monster at once--which was insanity.
What could he do, bare-handed, against that thirty-foot,
three-tentacled, silicate mass of incredible life!

It was useless to run, and it was madness to stay and confront the
thing. What, then, could he do? The sun had slid down the sky and the
red of another swift dusk was heralding the short night before he shook
his head somberly and gave the fatal riddle up.

He rose to his feet, intending to make his way back to the
concealment--such as it was--of the forest. It might be that he could
find safety in some lofty treetop till day dawned again. Then he
stopped, and listened. What was that?

From far away to the left he could hear faint sounds of some gargantuan
stirring. And, coincident with the flickering out of the last scrap of
sunlight, a distant crashing came to his ears as an enormous body
smashed like an armored ship through trees and thorn bushes and trailing
vines. The rock thing had found his trail an