The Beast of Space | Page 6

touched him, it would eat through the heavy fabric, exploding the air pressure from around his body. How was he to escape from the cave?
The answer came to him suddenly. Quickly he darted back toward the nearest vessel. Two of the screaming spheres blocked his way; he sent bolt after searing bolt into them, more of a charge than he had given any of the others. The lights in the globes went out; their voices ceased. And they burst into slowly mounting incandescence. Yet, they were not consumed by their fire, only glowed an intense white light like that of a lighthouse.
"Lighthouse!" The word flashed through his mind clearly, strongly. They glowed like the "zirconia lights" of a lighthouse. Why hadn't he recognized the greasy, quartz-like material before? It was zirconia, a compound of zirconium, of course. A silicate base creature could easily have formed a shell of it about itself.
Zirconia--one of the compounds he'd intended prospecting for on the moons of Saturn. Worth over a hundred dollars per pound. Because of its resistance to heat, it was used to line the tubes of rockets; Terra's supply had long been used up. Here was a fortune all around him; but that fortune was about to be destroyed, he along with it, if he did not hurry.
If he could only reach the timing mechanism to yank from it the wires connecting it to the other ships. It was at the other end of the line. He started in that direction, but a surge of fatal, thick acid rolled before him, reaching for him with hungry, questing tongues.
When it was almost touching his toes, he leaped. As he floated toward the floor, he placed a chair beneath him so that his feet landed on the seat. The legs of the chair sank slowly into the liquid.
Again he leaped, his moment retarded by the fluid which now reached halfway up the chair legs, sucked and clung there. The sweetly-evil smelling stuff was rising rapidly. But the next leap carried him into the main cave. Abandoning the chair, he leaped once more, out through the cave's mouth, pursued by the waving tentacles of the sensory spheres.
* * * * *
He had lost precious minutes eluding that deadly acid. It would take at least five minutes to get his ship away from the asteroid; he must hurry before all those rocket motors were thrown into action, or it would be too late.
Leap and leap again. It seemed ages, but he reached the ship, bolted the door shut. Thumps against the door as the pursuing globes ran up against it. A thought came to him; swiftly he opened the door, permitted a few of them to enter, then slammed it shut. With the heat gun he sheared off their tentacles; he could sell the zirconia in the entities. Then he turned to the controls and the ship zoomed up and out.
Nat had barely raised his ship from the Asteroid Moira when he saw the small planetoid lurch suddenly, bounding off its orbit at almost a right angle. The sudden combined driving force of all the rockets within the cave had sent it hurtling away like a rocket itself.
The asteroid housing the monster was heading into the Flora group of Asteroids. There the fifty-seven odd solid bodies of that group would grind, crack, and rend that dangerous beast into harmless, dead fragments.
"A good job," said a weak, but softly friendly voice behind him. He whirled. The girl stood in the doorway of the pilot room, supporting herself against the door frame. Digger rubbed thoughtfully against her legs.
"We'll just follow that asteroid, Miss," he said, "and see if we can't pick up some odd fragment of zirconia when it's smashed in the grindstone there. Then we'll light out for Terra."
She smiled. Earth, to him, seemed like a very good place to go as soon as possible.

Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from Comet July 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

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