Where had Torkine gone? We could not see him. We darted sidewise as a group of running men and women with Physicals chasing them swept past. And then again we saw Torkine. He was still carrying Dora, leaping over the rocks, zig-zagging, trying seemingly to reach the space-disc. The dark outlines of it were apparent no more than a hundred feet away. "No Physicals there!" Johnny gasped. We slanted our running leaps to head off Torkine. And suddenly he saw us and jumped to a little rocky butte where he stood leering down at us with his arm holding Dora as she sagged against him. A knife was in his hand now. The red-yellow chaos off to our left glistened on its naked blade. For a second I thought that he would plunge it into Dora's breast. Then suddenly behind him the little box-bodies of Physicals had appeared. Tentacle arms reached for him so that he dropped Dora. For a second she staggered, slumped and then fell over the little brink. Johnny and I scramblingly caught her; I snatched her in my arms and ran, with Johnny beside me. We reached the dark, space-disc doorway, and I turned to look back. Torkine was wildly slashing at a tentacle arm of a Physical that gripped him. Weird tissue-flesh of the damnable, gruesome thing. The steel knife-blade slid harmlessly on it; and then as he wildly stabbed at a box-like chest, the knife-blade broke. He screamed with a last agonized, throat-splitting cry as the plucking little things tumbled him from the rock and engulfed him.... "Tom, there they come! Hurry! Get inside--" Johnny gasped. We slide the doorslide as a plunging wave of Physicals came and hurled themselves against it.... Then in a moment the big disc was slowly rising. From a bullseye window of the central turret we could see the raging little things as they dropped from the rim of the disc. The ground slid slowly away beneath us. The sounds were shut off from us now. Mute, ghastly scene. We had only a brief glimpse of the glowing, wrathful monster. It palpitated, quivered in the midst of the carnage. Monster of the planet. Omnipotent ruler here. There were no humans running now. No human bodies were on the rocks. Nothing but crimsoned, noisome fragments with little shapes fighting over them. The terrible scene in a moment dropped away, blurred and was gone so that there was just starlight here in the turret. The myriad stars of Interplanetary Space. And at the dark, rocky horizon of the planetoid the Earth was just rising, a great mellow crescent, beckoning us. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Monster of the Asteroid, by Ray Cummings