a club-like weapon, seemingly made of the heavy slate-gray rock, sleekly polished to a knife-like edge.

"Zogg, take them," she said in her calm English.

"All of them, Tara?"

"No. All but this one." Her imperious gesture went to me. "With him I will talk more."

Zogg's weird face twisted into a grin. A bluish tongue, like the tongue of an animal, licked the pallid lips of his slit of mouth. That the girl had taught him English was obvious. He had spoken to her haltingly, mouthing the words with his guttural voice.

"Not—hurt them?" he demanded.

"No," she flashed. "Never will I have that here. Well do you know it." Her cold-blue eyes glittered with her sudden angry emotion, and before it, Zogg drew away. And then she burst at him in his own language. I could guess that she was directing him what to do with the three prisoners. Duroh tried again to speak but was silenced. A dozen of the little side guards came pouncing forward.

"Easy," I warned. "Don't put up a fight, Duroh."

They were engulfed by the Zurians, shoved through the side archway, and were gone.

"Sit here by me," Tara said calmly.

At her gesture I sat on the side of the dais, with her calm gaze upon me as she questioned me. How shall I describe my first strange talk with Tara? Under her questions I described frankly our expedition, who we were, what we had come for, and what had happened. And then suddenly I began questioning her. I had thought that her beautiful cold-blue eyes would flash with the little lightnings as they had at Zogg. But instead she said quietly,

"I shall tell you about myself, because there is no reason why I should not."

I had guessed what at least the main circumstances of her history must be.... The Blake expedition, which had left earth some sixteen years ago and never returned, had landed here on Zura, when the little asteroid previously had come into our Solar System. Landed here, with its space-ship smashed in the landing.

"George Simpson was my father," Tara was saying. "Everyone is dead now, of that little group, except me."

I was myself only some four years old when the Blake expedition disappeared. 

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