Drake turned away. "You watch here, Frank. Keep him covered." I stood, a few moments later, in the passage whispering with Drake. We had an hour of grace. Togaro, from the window beside him, could see our progress toward landing. We did not dare do anything else with the ship. But there was an hour. And I had a plan. Desperate; to me, with my inexperience in these strange conditions, it was a plan incredibly awesome. Yet I could think of nothing else which might be done. A plan by which I might rescue Dianne and kill Togaro. I whispered it to Drake. He said at last, "Yes, I guess it's the only thing. You think I should go with you? Two of us--" "No. The chances are better with one." "Then I will try it," he said. But I shook my head. We stood out of Togaro's sight and hearing. Ahlma was with us. Ahlma said, "But, Frank, you are not used to it. If you would trust it to a girl--" But that was not feasible. Drake would have been better than I, no doubt. "If I do not come back," I urged, "you, Drake, are needed here. And when the ship lands--it is you who are needed, not I." It seemed the best thing to do. I had an hour before the landing. And I was ready now. I needed no preparations. I wore my belt of the drugs; I carried a knife like a short sword. I edged up as close to the doorway of Togaro's cabin as I could get without his seeing me. I took the diminishing drug. CHAPTER XVII _The Tiny Prowler_ "Good-by, Frank," Drake reached carefully down and touched my dwindling shoulder with the tip of his finger. "Be cautious--don't take too many chances." "No." "Remember--if he once sees you--well, that's the end, Frank." I called softly upward. "I'll be careful. You give me the signal, Drake, when you think I'm small enough to start toward him. And remember the plan. If I can distract his attention--if Dianne leaps away--you shoot him." I was already not much higher than Drake's shoe top. The passage floor was in shadow. The wall was drawing away from me. I had taken what was perhaps half of one of the pellets of the weakest intensity. Its effect was gone in a minute or two. I stood quiet, trying to judge my height compared to Drake; and waiting for his signal to tell me that I was small enough to dare advance into Togaro's doorway. A scene of singular strangeness, here on the floor of the shadowed passageway! The floor was a grid, or grill of laced metal. I saw it now as a spread of level surface; girders three feet wide, with others crossing to checker it into squares--three-foot squares, each of them a black abyss. The perpendicular passage wall was fifty feet from me. The other way, I could see Drake's monstrous figure; it blurred up into the distance overhead. I gazed, trying to estimate his apparent height. Four hundred feet tall, or more. Beyond him--it seemed a quarter of a mile at least--there was the blur of Ahlma's robe.