The alien giant was too swollen to turn swiftly. Pink reached the wall display. He tore down an assegai, whirled and thrust it at the monstrous, contorted face, searching for the eyes. He was a mouse, bedeviling a cat with a broom straw. The thing batted his spear aside, brushed him with its fingers in a powerful swat, smashed him against his desk. A corner caught him, and he felt a rib snap. The pain enraged him. * * * * * In that desk he kept his other collection, ammunition for those weapons: it was his boast that he had at least six rounds for every projectile-thrower there. Some of it had been painstakingly fashioned in modern times from the old formulae, some miraculously preserved through the centuries. On strange planets he and Jerry used to have target practice with the ancient toys. Now the agony and the fear forced him into a gesture. He would die in this room, for certainly he'd never tell the giant where to find the air-lock switches; he had to go down fighting, and if to fight this impervious lout was the most futile of gestures, at least he would make it a glorious one! Fumbling, he tore open a drawer and clutched a box out of it. This was the ammunition for the Colt revolver. Gripping it in his left hand, he jumped aside as the beast put out a hand for him. He fled across the room, his ears cringing from the titanic yells of fury behind him. Now he had to get the Colt .44 from the wall. It took him three horrible minutes of dodging and bounding to reach the weapons again. He snatched at the revolver, missed, made another desperate grab as he dropped to the rug; the second time he had it. He crawled under a chest which stood twenty inches off the floor. Luckily the alien was trying to catch him, not slay him, for it could long since have smeared him into jelly with a piece of furniture for a bludgeon. Feverishly he loaded the chambers of the Colt. For a moment his scattered wits could not recollect just how to operate this special weapon. Then he remembered. The fingers of the monster, sausage-sized and disgusting in their parody of humanity, came groping beneath the chest. Pinkham wormed back and came up behind it, staring into the red eyes. With a concentration of power that he had not known he could summon, he shot out from behind the chest and vaulted onto the top of his enormous desk. The alien, lips curling, straightened till its head brushed the ceiling. It reached out for him. In the last split second, Pink had a vision of himself, and instead of a glorious gesture, it seemed to him suddenly that he was making an awful ass of himself. Like a man before a firing squad thumbing his nose.... Nevertheless, he aimed the Colt full into the gargantuan face before him, and pulled the trigger. CHAPTER XIII