“I see,” Sherman said as they rounded a shoulder of lava. “You’re unlucky. However, you’ll be safe for a while. There’s my castle, see?”

Fifty feet away the building loomed, a dome-shaped structure as high as a six-story building. It seemed to be built of some gleaming black substance, broken at intervals by round gaps. Sherman marched forward, straight toward a blank wall.

No—not entirely blank—there was an inch-wide hole in it. And the hole began to broaden as they approached, opening till it was a gaping portal.

They stepped across the threshold. Behind them the hole shrank again, like a sphincter. They were in a large room, bare except for a sloping ramp that led up to a gap in the ceiling. A row of luminous spots glowed in the walls.

Sherman went up the ramp. Kathleen was behind him, a little troubled now, conscious of some unknown danger. Above, the room was larger, lighted by similar lightspots in the walls. It was filled with a clutter of junk—chairs, tables—some of them twisted and broken—most of them rusty.

“Salvage,” Sherman said. He went to a corner, dropped Quade into a shallow depression in the floor and tossed his whip aside. Quade’s body sank down a few inches, as though into an air mattress.

“Well, take off your helmet,” Sherman said coolly. “Make yourself at home. You’ll be here for life—since there’s no way of getting out of this valley!”

CHAPTER VPerilous Valley

Kathleen sat down limply on a rusty chair that squeaked under her weight. Her fingers felt cold and clumsy as she unscrewed her helmet, deflated the spacesuit and shook her hair free.

“No way out?” she said. “We could climb—”

“You could try it,” Sherman said, “till you got tired. The glaciers wall us in. And they crumble. I broke my arm six years ago trying to escape.”

“Six years!”

“I’ve been here seven,” Sherman told her. “I’m the last survivor of the patrol ship Kestrel, wrecked while making a forced landing in the Devil’s Range. Three of us escaped with our lives from the crash—the ship’s doctor, myself and another patrolman. Their graves are down the valley a bit.” His eyes were blank.

“Seven years here, with the Zonals gradually losing their fear of me. They multiply 

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