When everything was ready Rod strode forward like Achilles taunting the Trojans. He exhausted his vocabulary. All the vituperative terms he could remember and a few that came to him extempore were hauled out to describe the tetrarchs. He told them they would be frozen to provide lights for their own mines--that the humans would break them into small chunks to make jewels for Earth’s women. It worked. It was more than tetrarch nature could take. * * * * * Doors opened for a fleeting second. The vengeful flames showered him with darts. In that brief interval they were met with withering blasts from the marksmen. The humans had brought the oxygen machinery up from the slave compartment. It streamed toward the building like water from a pressure hose. At the same instant the volunteers rushed. For an instant the fight teetered in the balance--and then they were in. Rod bristled with sand-blunted darts as he battered his way through the honey-combed building, searching for the operating chamber. He burst through the entrance--to face Mona Darlanan. They hadn’t had time to work on her. But they’d done their best. They’d tied her to a vertical platform first. The dart in her breast had drawn blood! Latham Koler squirmed from behind the platform. His cadaverous face was transfixed with the grin of a skeleton skull. He aimed a blaster point blank at Rod and fired. The streaming arc buried itself harmlessly in the three-inch sand layer over Rod’s chest. And he was on Koler like a berserk. He broke the traitor’s helmet first. And forced fingers and thumb around his windpipe. When the peering eyes protruded and the thin-lipped mouth hung agape Rod lifted the dart gently from Mona Darlanan’s body. He jammed it down Koler’s throat. Williamson came pounding in. “We’ve got them all, Rod. Tetrarch IV is in our hands!” Rod was frantically tearing at his sleeve. “Get me a knife,” he ordered, “quickly.” He ripped the sleeve off. As more and more Survivors came piling into the room he ordered liters of distilled water. Meanwhile he was busily plying the scalpel Williamson brought to him. The gash on his arm had never quite healed was getting probed. Rod dug with the scalpel as though he were going after a bullet. The small platinum capsule he forced from the cut in his arm was not unlike one. He glanced anxiously at Mona’s face. The pallor had gone. A harshening of her exquisite skin had taken its place. The contents of the capsule dissolved in five liters of water in a matter of seconds. Rod picked an unfilled dart from a litter on a table. He filled it with his newly made solution and injected it in the girl’s arm. They waited. “Will it do any good, Rod?” Williamson was solemn in the quiet room. “I don’t know. We developed it on Earth in our lab in the Rockies. There was plenty of gryxon in our machines. Volunteers exposed themselves to it. That capsule, Bill, was purchased at the price of martyrdom.”