he paused for a moment, listening. The cold fire that burned within him left no room for fatigue, for pain.

A murmuring, then a laugh, cut through the deathlike stillness. Allan was nearly to the top. Down the corridor into which he crept, snakelike on his belly, red light flickered from an open door.

Dane moved soundlessly to that door, and, lying flat, pushed his head slowly past the sash till he could see within. By the light of a fire that danced in the center of the unburnable mallite floor, its illumination half revealing their sodden, brutish faces, he saw an unspeakably strange group. A scene from out of the dawn of history it was, the haunch-squatted circle, their yellow skins and black glistening in the crimson, shifting glow. He recognized the giant Negro, Ra-Jamba, his head bound with a rag, and Jung Sin. There were five others clustered about those two, and a third, a skew-eyed Oriental, intent on some game they were playing with little sticks that passed from hand to hand.

Before each of the players there was a little pile of fish bones, black with much handling. The Negro's pile, and that of Jung Sin, were about equal, but there were only two or three in front of the third player. And just as Allan caught sight of them, the sticks clicked, and a shrill objurgation burst from that third as the last of his markers were raked in by Jung Sin's taloned hand. The circle hunched closer, there was a ribald, taunting laugh from Ra-Jamba and Jung Sin glanced over his shoulder into a shadowed corner.

"Have patience, my lotus flower," he purred. "Only one is left. Soon the goddess of fortune and love will clear him from my path. By the nine-headed Dragon, I have never seen a game of Li-Fan last so long. But it draws to an end. Then we shall have our joy together, you and I."

In that instant the fire flared. Allan saw an open window in the background, and beneath it a slim white form lying, bound and helpless. Fierce joy leaped in him, and fiercer hate, Naomi was as yet untouched, the game was being played for her as stake. He had come in time to save her!

But how? There were eight of the Easterners in the room. He had his ray-gun, and might cow them with it and free the girl. But as soon as he had gotten her out of the room, they would surge out after the whites. He could fight for a while, but the end was inevitable. And even if by some miracle he and Naomi escaped, they would be tracked to Sugar Loaf.

The sticks were clicking in a continuous rattle as the final bout of the game waxed fast and furious. And as fast and furious was the whirl of Allan's thoughts. He strove to remember the layout of this building. The helicopter hangar was next above this level. Outside the windows of this floor a narrow ledge ran. The nebulous scheme that had entered his dazed brain as he read the bronze plate below took clearer form, shaped itself to meet this new need.

Allan crept away to safe distance, leaped to his feet and flitted upward. He was in the empty, echoing space of the hangar level. The fuel tanks bulged huge in the dimness. Here were reels of the feed hose he needed—flexible metal that had withstood the years; here a faucet nozzle, and a long coil of fine wire. Haste driving him, he made the connections. Then he was descending again, dragging behind him a long black snake of hose whose other end was clamped to a vat of oxygen impregnated gasoline.

The rustle of the hose along the hall floor was muffled by the greasy slime. Dane got the nozzle to just outside the door of the room where Naomi lay captive. The rattle of the playing sticks still continued. Jung Sin's voice sounded, in a language that Allan did not understand. But there was no mistaking the triumphant note in the silky, jeering tones. The yellow man was winning, and winning fast.

Dane twisted one end of the wire around the faucet handle. Then he was unwinding the coil as he tried the door of the chamber next to the one where the fire burned, found it open, darted across the room and softly raised the sash. The sill here, like the one beneath which Naomi lay, was a bare two feet above the ground.

He was out on the ledge, sliding along it toward the fire-reddened oblong five feet away. He crammed his body close against the wall, kept his eyes away from the unfenced edge of that eighteen-inch shelf. Beyond, an abyss waited, twelve thousand feet of nothingness down which a single misstep, an instant's vertigo, would send him hurtling. Suddenly the rattle of sticks stopped, and he heard the black's long howl of disappointed rage. The game was over!

Allan reached the window, glimpsed a leering semicircle of animal faces, saw Jung Sin coming toward him. Then he had swung in.

"Back, Jung Sin! Back!" Allan was straddled over Naomi's form, the ray-gun thrust out before his tense threat, his face livid, his eyes blazing. "Get back, or I ray you!"

Consternation, awe, flashed into the brutal faces of the Easterners. Jung Sin reeled back, his saffron hands rising. Allan's weapon swept slowly along the line of staring men. "If one of you moves I flash."

He bent to the girl, keeping his eyes on the Easterners, and his weapon steady. He had hung the wire coil over his shoulder, leaving his left hand free to fumble for and untie the cords around Naomi's wrists. He got them loose.

"Can you get your feet free, Naomi?"

"Yes, I can manage it." Her voice was steady, but there was a great thankfulness vibrant in it.

"Then do it and get out on the ledge. Quick." He straightened, and the blaze of his eyes held the yellow men, and the black, motionless.

Naomi, at the window behind him, gasped. "I know it looks tough," he encouraged her, "but you can make it. Don't look down. Go to the left. And keep clear of that wire."

"I'm all right, Allan. But you—"

"Never mind about me. Go ahead."

Jung Sin jerked forward, driven by the madness that twisted his face into gargoyle hideousness. But Allan's ray-gun stabbed at him, and he halted.

"I'm out, Allan."

Dane's foot felt back of him for the sill, found it. He lifted, facing his enemies inexorably, caught the lintel with his left hand, and was crouching outside. A sidewise flick of his eyes showed Naomi just reaching the other window.

He pulled at the wire till it was gently taut. A moment's compunction rose in him at what he was about to do. Then the black roll of the Easterners' crimes rushed into his mind. Naomi's safety, his own, and that of the little colony that had endured so much to preserve humanity, cried out for their extinction. Allan jerked the metal thread, and the faucet nozzle in the corridor opened.

A black stream gushed forward, reached the fire, and the room was a roaring furnace. Allan saw the forms of his enemies silhouetted against the blaze for a fleeting instant, then they were flaming statues. One only, Jung Sin, nearer than the rest, leaped for the window and escaped the first gush of flame. Allan pressed the trigger of his ray-gun. But no blue flash answered that pressure. The weapon's charge had leaked out, was gone!

Allan tore himself loose from yellow hands that clutched at him, his fist crashed into Jung Sin's fear twisted visage, and the crazed Oriental fell back into the roaring blaze.

But Allan himself was thrust backward by that blow, was swaying on the very edge of the chasm. His hand went out for a saving hold on the window sash; flame licked at it. He was toppling, against the strain of his body muscles to resist the inevitable fall, and death reached up from depths for him. Then an arm was around him, was drawing him back to life. Naomi had darted back, defying the terror of that height, the surge of heat. She had reached him just in time—a split-second later and his weight would have been too much for her puny strength. But in this instant, the merest