The voice came faintly again, "We see them. We'll take care of them. Haines made it back to the ship. The Pluto base is destroyed. There are only those two ships left. We followed them here as fast as we could. Can you hold out until we draw them out and crack them? We will need a little time." Burl called, "Don't worry about me. Go to it. Russ may be alive in their building here. Don't bomb it. I'm going to try to get in." "Okay," called Lockhart's voice, already growing weak as the _Magellan_ and the two pursuing foes drew away. Burl turned to the Neptunian captain. He drew his hand across the sky to show that the ships had gone, drawn away from their protection of the temple. He pointed at the walls of the building with a "let's go" gesture. Burl noticed that though the Neptunians were apparently featureless, he could sense a distinct tightening up in their actions. They were tensed, ready for the final battle. They marched up to the main door of the temple. The captain loosed a bolt of electronic fire at it, but it left no mark. There was no sound from within. Evidently the Plutonians were either busy about their own business, or did not regard the Neptunians as worth their attention. In a covered panel right next to the door, Burl found the typical Sun-tap controls. He tried to work them, but they would not function through his gloves. He hesitated, knowing that removing his glove this time might prove very risky. Then he hastily drew off his left gauntlet and the thin nylon glove that was the inner protection of his suit. He placed his hand on the control. The icy cold bit into it. He twisted, the control worked, and he tore his hand away, replacing the gloves. The door slid open. Burl ran inside, followed by half a dozen Neptunians. They were in a small antechamber, evidently an air lock. The Neptunians, leaping with excitement, did not bother to activate the inner door, which would have meant closing the outer door. Instead, they attacked it with heavy ice axes. The strange tools, chilled to a hardness unthinkable on Earth, bit into the fragile plastic. After a few hard blows, the plastic split, and there was a small explosion as the air within the temple burst through. A gale of escaping gases roared through the little chamber, ripping the rest of the door to shards and hurling the Neptunians right and left. Outside, the flow began to congeal, and a thin snow of liquid air began to fall. When the blast subsided after several minutes, the Neptunians jumped up, shook off the new gas-snow, and charged through the doorway into the temple itself. Burl held his Plutonian flashgun at the ready. Inside, they found chaos and disaster. In the great rooms and halls Plutonians writhed on the floors, in the last throes of suffocation and freezing, now that the air had been ripped from their stronghold.