blackness of the sky and the gleaming stars;--yet the sun shone through. For a moment he forgot his loneliness, his pain, in rapt contemplation of the immense perfection above him--but only for a moment. Then the explanation came to him. That beautiful blue was the heavy atmosphere of Toon, which was slowly crushing him to death! He closed his eyes.

The heat was terrific, but not as intense as he had expected. Toon was nearer the Sun than was his own world--millions of miles nearer; yet he was not badly burnt, and this puzzled him. The explanation must again lie in the heavy atmosphere--serving as insulation, he finally decided.... He didn't care.

He felt strangely detached. What signifies life--or death--to a tiny being separated by fifty million miles from any of its kind? Deposited on this strange planet, he had no hopes of survival; his only emotion was astonishment that he had lived a moment.

He struggled to remove the parachute that had been so inadequate in easing his fall. Movement--even the raising of an arm was serious effort. He was glued to the ground by the tremendous gravitational pull of a planet so much greater in size than his own. He relaxed.

Why struggle? With the passing of hope, all incentive to effort passes also. He felt no distress at the thought of death. Life, not death, would be freakish in this great wasteland.

And he was past anger now. What they had done to him they had done through hate and fear. Only hate and fear could conceive of so fantastic a torture for a fellow being. There was no satisfaction now in the knowledge that they had feared him; nor did he care about their hate.... They had won. They would have their way, and all the people of the Loten would suffer in consequence....

Loten! A wave of sick loneliness swept over him.... A point in the sky, obscured by a weird curtain of blue--his home!

Certainly, no man had ever suffered thus! A surge of self-pity welled up within him. Certainly no being had ever been forced to long for the world--the globe which gave it birth! This horror was reserved for him alone....

He clenched his fists. Reason returned to rescue him from emotion. Loten did not exist for him. He was outside of the world--a tiny flame of consciousness in space. And what did that amount to, after all, he asked himself.... What, but Death?...

For a long time he lay there 

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