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The move was unthinkingly, mechanically made. Too many times had he gone through this process of being aimed by astronomical calculation, and launched into the heavens, to be much stirred by the wonder of it. The journey to Z-40 in the Dart was no more disquieting than, a century and a half ago, before the United States had fused together into one vast city, a journey from Chicago to Florida would have been in one of the inefficient gasoline-driven vehicles of that day.

All his thoughts were on his destination, and on a wonder as to what could be the nature of the thing that dwelt there.

He had just come from the sanitarium where the man who’d bought Z-40 before him was recovering from nervous exhaustion. He’d gone there to try to get first hand information about the creature the executive at the Celestial Developments Company had talked so vaguely of. And the tale the convalescent had told him of the thing on the asteroid was as fantastic as it was sketchy.

A tremendous, weirdly manlike creature looming in the dim night–a thing that seemed a part of the planetoid itself, fashioned from the very dirt and rock from which it had risen–a thing immune to the ray-pistol, that latest and deadliest of man-made small-arms–a thing that moved like a walking mountain and stared with terrible, stony eyes at its prey! That was what the fellow said he had faintly made out in the darkness before his nerves had finally given way.

He had impressed Harley as being a capable kind of a person, too; not at all the sort to distort facts, nor to see imaginary figures in the night.

There was that matter of the stone splinter, however, which certainly argued that the wan, prematurely white-haired fellow was a little unbalanced, and hence not to be believed too implicitly. He’d handed it to Harley, and gravely declared it to be a bit of the monster’s flesh.

“Why, it’s only a piece of rock!” Harley had exclaimed before he could check himself.

“Did you ever see rock like it before?”

Turning it over in his hands, Harley had been forced to admit that he never had. It was of the texture and roughness of granite, but more heavily shot with quartz, or tridymite than any other granite he’d ever seen. It had a dull opalescent sheen, too. But it was rock, all right.

“It’s a piece of the thing’s hide,” the man had told him. “It flaked off when it tried to pry open the man-hole cover of ray Dart. A moment after that I got Radivision arc directions from London Field, aimed my sights, and shot for Earth. It was a miracle I escaped.”

“But surely your ray-pistol–” Harley had begun, preserving a discreet silence about the man’s delusion concerning the stone splinter.

“I tell you it was useless as a toy! Never before have I seen any form of life that could stand up against a ray-gun. But this thing did !”

This was another statement Harley had accepted with a good deal of reservation. He had felt sure the weapon the man had used had a leak in the power chamber, or was in need of recharging, or something of the kind. For it had been conclusively proved that all organic matter withered and burned away under the impact of the Randchron ray.

Nevertheless, discounting heavily the convalescent’s wild story, only a fool would have clung to a conviction that the menace on Z-40 was a trivial one. There was something on that asteroid, something larger and more deadly than Harley had ever heard of before in all his planetary wanderings.

He squared his shoulders. Whatever it was, he was about to face it, man against animal. He was reasonably certain his ray-gun would down anything on two legs or ten. If it didn’t–well, there was nothing else that could; and he’d certainly provide a meal for the creature, assuming it ate human flesh….