on their burnished, grey-white metal casements. Then as they moved, I saw that their garments were of flexible woven metal.

The one at the controls was bareheaded, a round bullet head of close-cropped black hair. His face was heavy; skin queerly grey-white. Weird features, with a protruding chin and long hawk nose so that the mouth was a greylipped slit, depressed between the projections of his nose and lower jaw. And he had deep-set, round dark eyes under shaven black brows.

Men of science. Humans whose life was of such efficient, mechanical rigidity that they themselves had the aspect of machines. Worshipers of precision; of mechanization. The aura of it was on them.

I saw that one of them was sitting impassive, stiffly erect in his metal garments with his gaze roving me like a guard. Strange, jewel-like little weapons were at his waist and in pouches of his metal jacket. On his head was a metal, peaked helmet—its peak fashioned in the form of a hawk-like bird, poised for screaming flight. Across the starlit circular room, another of the men was sitting, gazing out at the firmament. A man? I stared with a new amazement. The same square, jointed metal garments. But the hips were wider, the shoulders more narrow. A woman, of this mechanized race of Gorts. Her breast swelled beneath her mailed tunic. Her hair was black, long to the base of her neck, covering her ears. A shining black metal band was around her forehead, holding the hair from her eyes.

Strange, powerful Amazon. She was a good six feet tall; her face was hawk-nosed like the men, but with lips that were fuller, of a reddish tinge. Then as I stared, the man at the controls called to her:

"Garga—"

She rose; moved to him. Her dangling weapons, and a huge metal ornament on her bosom, clanked as she walked. At the control table the leader gave her orders; guttural crisp words unintelligible to me. She nodded; went to a small table across the room, where with charts and computations she seemed figuring the course of our flight.

Garga, woman of the Gorts. Mechanized womanhood, with all that womanhood stands for in my own world submerged within her so that she was a mere female machine. And suddenly my mind, still dazed now in these first moments of my returning consciousness, swept back to Nereid. Strange world, this Venus, to hold two such contrasting types of female! What a gulf between them!

Where was 

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