The white quicksand went over the space suit visor and cut out the light of the moon. Still he kept sinking, slowly, steadily, in the depths. * * * * * With an effort he forced his hand to his belt and adjusted the levers to permit oxygen for his breathing to swell the space suit. He could breath, but he could not control his movements. The pressure of the wet sand weighted heavily on him and smothered him in a blanket of darkness. He moved down slowly as on greased feathers into a bottomless pit. His legs dangled limply, drifting now this way, now that. He put his arms out to steady himself, but the muck gave way before him. He heard only the slight bubbling sound of the oxygen escaping through the vent in his space suit. He felt a sucking pull on his body and on his limbs as he went down--down-- At last he hung suspended. His weight balanced the density of the pressure of the sand. His mind worked furiously--in a race with death. He remembered the slight alkaline taste that had penetrated to his mouth and nose back on the surface. Alkaline? He had read about that--in the "_Cross Currents of Space_"--Orus was the borax planet. And suddenly his training in the chemistry of borax rushed through his frantic mind. He smiled grimly to himself as he reached for the heat ray gun at his waist. No, it hadn't been lost. He detached it and forced it through the quicksand in front of him. Carefully he aimed the heat ray gun upward, pressed the trigger. Light so bright and intense and so hot that Rawson felt the heat and light in the clutching quicksand bored a hole through the muck. It was a thin rod of penetration, about two inches wide and extended straight upwards to where Rawson thought the edge of the pit would be. Long and patiently he trained the heat ray gun. And as he waited a chemical change took place before his eyes. In the light of the heat ray gun, he saw a thin rod of white porous mass forming. It extended through the quicksand upward along the line of the heat ray. And as he watched, the white mass melted into a clear liquid. He kept the heat ray gun concentrated until its power died and the weapon became a useless piece of metal. Rawson had won. He had created liquid glass. Patiently he waited for the liquid to harden. Would it make it possible for him to escape this quicksand death? For hours he hung suspended in the ooze. When he judged that there had been time enough for the liquid to harden into glass, he extended his hand toward it. His groping fingers found a strong, smooth rod fused to the rock above. Hand over hand he made his way up, forcing himself through the heavy ooze. When he reached the top, he crawled out, half dead and staggered to firm ground. He stumbled. But he saw at a glance that he had drifted far from the place where he had fallen in. The space ship was several hundred yards away, completely hidden by a hill.