V

Spike backed away, toward the top of the ridge.

'Stay back,' he warned, with his gun still leveled. 'Don't try to follow. I'll let you have it if you do.'

'But,' shrieked the senator, 'you don't mean to leave us here, do you? We'll die!'

The bandit waved his pistol toward the southeast.

'Satellite City is over that way. You can make it on four hours of air. I did.'

His laugh boomed in their helmets.

'But you won't. Not creaking old scarecrows like you.'

Then he was gone over the ridge.

Gramp, suddenly galvanized into action, leaped toward the lifeless body of the pilot. He tugged the space-suited figure over and his hand reached out and jerked the flame pistol free.

One swift glance told him it was undamaged.

'You can't do that!' Jurg Tec yelled at him.

'Get outta my way, Marshy,' yelped Gramp. 'I'm goin' after him.'

Gramp started up the hill.

Topping the ridge, he saw Spike halfway to the ship.

'Come back and fight,' Gramp howled, waving his gun. 'Come back and fight, you ornery excuse for a polecat.'

Spike swung about, snapped a wild burst of flame along his backtrail and then fled, in ludicrous hops, toward the space ship.

Gramp halted, aimed the flame pistol carefully and fired. Spike turned a somersault in mid-air and sprawled on the ground. Gramp saw the guns Spike had taken from them flash redly in the Jupiter-light as the flame struck home.

'He dropped the guns!' Gramp yelled.

But Spike was up again and running, although his left arm hung limply from the shoulder, swinging freely as he hopped over the surface.

Too far away,' grunted Jurg Tec, overtaking Gramp.

'I had 'im dead center,' Gramped yelled, 'but it was a mite long range.'

Spike reached the ship and leaped into the port.

Cursing, Gramp laid down a blast of flame against the ship as the bandit swung in the outer lock.

'Dang it,' shrieked Gramp, 'he got away.'

Dejectedly the two old veterans stood and stared at the ship.

'I guess this ends it for us,' said Jurg Tec.

'Not by a dang sight,' declared Gramp. 'We'll make it back to Satellite City easy.'

But he didn't believe it. He knew they wouldn't.

He heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hill and turned. The senator was hurrying toward them.

'What happened to you?' demanded Jurg Tec.

'I fell and twisted my ankle,' the senator explained.

'Sure,' said Gramp, 'it's plumb easy for a feller to sprain his ankle. Especially at a time like this.'

The ground shuddered under their feet as the ship leaped out into space with rockets blasting.

Gramp plodded doggedly along. He heard the hissing of the snow against his space suit. Heard it crunching underfoot. Heard the stumbling footsteps of the other two behind him.

Jupiter was lower in the sky. lo had moved away from its position against the darkened segment of the primary, was swinging free in space.

Before him Gramp saw the bitter hills, covered with drift snow, tinted a ghastly red by the flood of Jupiter-light.

One foot forward and now another. That was the way to do it. Keep plugging away.

But he knew it wasn't any use. He knew that he would die on Ganymede.

'Forty years ago I fit here and came through without a scratch,' he told himself. 'And now I come back to die here.'

He remembered that day of forty years before. Remembered how the sky was laced with fiery flame-ribbons and stabbing ray-beams. How ships, their guns silenced, rammed enemy craft and took them with them to the surface.

'We'll never make it,' moaned the senator.

Gramp swung on him savagely; a steel-sheathed fist lifted menacingly.

'You stop your bawlin',' he shouted. 'You sound like a sick calf. I'll smack you down if I hear one more peep out of you.'

'But what's the use of fooling ourselves?' the senator cried. 'Our air is nearly gone. We don't even know if we're going in the right direction.'

Gramp roared at him.

'Buck up, you spineless jackass. You're a big man. A senator. Remember that. You gotta get back.

Who'd they get to make all 'em speeches if you didn't get back?'

Jurg Tec's voice hissed in Gramp's helmet. 'Listen!'

Gramp stood still and listened.

But there was nothing to hear. Just the hiss of the snow against his suit.

'I don't hear nothin',' Gramp said.

And then he heard it-a weird thunder that seemed to carry with it an indefinable threat of danger. A thunder like the stamping of many feet, like the measured march of hoofs.

'Ever hear anything like that, Earthy?' asked the Martian.

'It isn't anything,' shrieked the senator. 'Nothing at all. We just imagine it. We all are going cra/y.'

The thunder sounded nearer and nearer-clearer and clearer.

'There ain't supposed to be a livin' thing on Ganymede,' said Gramp. 'But there's somethin' out there.

Somethin' alive.'

He felt prickles of fear run up his spine and ruffle the hair at the base of his skull.

A long line of things moved out of the horizon haze and into indistinct vision-a nightmare line of things that shone and glittered in the rays of Jupiter.

'My Lord,' said Gramp, 'what are they?'

He glanced around.

To their left was a deep cut-bank, where erosion of long past ages had scooped out a deep, but narrow depression in the hillside.

'This way,' Gramp yelled and leaped away, heading for the cut bank.

The line of charging horrors was nearer when they reached the natural fortress.

Gramp looked at Jurg Tec.

'Marshy,' he croaked, 'if you never fit before, get ready for it now.'

Jurg Tec nodded grimly, his flame pistol in his fist.

The senator whimpered.

Gramp swung on him, drew back his fist and let drive a blow that caught the senator in the center of his breast-plate and sent him sprawling.

Gramp snarled at him.

'Get out your gun, dang you,' he shrieked, 'and pretend you are a man.'

The bunched monsters were closing in-a leaping, frightful mass of beasts that gleamed weirdly in the moon- and primary light. Massive jaws and cruel, taloned claw and whipping tentacles.

Gramp leveled his flame gun.

'Now,' he shouted, 'let 'em have it.'

From the jaws of the cut-bank leaped a blast of withering fire that swept the monsters as they charged and seemed to melt them down. But those behind climbed over and charged through the ones the flame had stopped and came on, straight toward the men who crouched in the shadow of the hill.

Gramp's gun was getting hot. He knew that in a moment it would be a warped and useless thing. That it might even explode in his hand and kill all three of them. For the flame gun is not built to stand continuous fire.

And still the things came on.

Before the cut-bank lay a pile of bodies that glowed metal-red where the pistol flames had raked them.

Gramp dropped his gun and backed away toward the wall of the cut bank.

Jurg Tec still crouched and worked his pistol with short, sharp, raking jabs, trying to keep it from over-heating.

In a smaller recess crouched the whimpering senator, his gun still in its holster.

Cursing him, Gramp leaped at him, hauled out the flame gun and shoved the senator to one side.

'Let your gun cool, Marshy,' Gramp yelled.

He aimed the new weapon at a shambling thing that crawled over the barricade of bodies. Calmly he blasted it straight between the eyes.

'We'll need your gun later,' Gramp yelled at Jurg Tec.

A shadowy something, with spines around its face and with a cruel beak just below its eyes, charged over the barricade and Gramp blasted it with one short burst.

The attack was thinning out.

Gramp held his pistol ready and waited for more. But no more came.

'What are 'em dog-gone things?' asked Gramp, jerking his pistol toward the pile of bodies.

'Don't know,' said the Martian. There aren't supposed to be any beasts on Ganymede.'

They acted dog-gone funny,' Gramp declared. 'Not exactly like animals. Like something you would up and put down on the floor. Like toys. Like the toy animals I got my grandson for Christmas year or two ago. You wound 'em up and the little rascals run around in circles.'

Jurg Tec stepped outside the cut-bank, nearer to the pile of bodies.

'You be careful, Marshy,' Gramp called out.

'Look here, Earthy,' yelled the Martian.

Gramp strode forward and looked. And what he saw — instead of flesh and bone, instead of any animal structure — were metal plates and molten wire and cogs of many shapes and sizes.

'Robots,' he said. I'll be a bowlegged Marshy if that ain't what they are. Nothin' but dog-gone robot animals.'

The two old soldiers looked at one another.

'It was a tight squeeze at that,' said Jurg Tec.

'We sure licked hell out of 'em,' Gramp exulted.

'Say,' said Jurg Tec, 'they were supposed to have a robot-animal fight at Satellite City. You don't suppose these things were the robots? Got loose some way?'

'By cracky,' said Gramp, 'maybe that explains it.'

He straightened from his examination of the heap of twisted, flame-scarred metal and looked at the sky. Jupiter was almost gone.

'We better get goin',' Gramp decided.