wave length and in a moment they were drowned in Russian.

Angel sighed with relief and looked back at the last of the doors which had led out from Slavinsky. Ruler of the world, was he?

Well, maybe he could manage to get some good out of it. But as for Angel, give him control over a bar stool of the Madrillon and Slavinsky could keep the Moon.

Musing, he found himself in a column and outward bound.

CHAPTER IV

Wait for the Night

It was still twilight on the surface and the earthlight was quite bright even where the blackness of airless night lay upon the stabbed and pitted world. The pumice-covered plains were upheaved into abrupt cliffs and slashed apart by ugly chasms.

It was a nightmare land where one bobbed in levitation-like gyrations, skating over soft and treacherous pumice bogs, plowing through the basalt dust of rays, all under an indigo sky.

Meteors landed soundlessly with the enormous explosions of bombs and each twenty-four hours millions fell. Sometimes clouds rose up to catch the higher rays of the slow-motion sun and hung there, twisting the light into colors.

Man was experiencing his first contact with the wild, garish, infinitely dangerous power of space, billions of times as strong, as capricious, as his ancient enemy the sea.

All was so slow, so quiet, so vastly untenanted. And far away the aura-crowned Earth hung silent, watchful in the sky, satellite of this dead world.

Their imperishable tracks stretched behind them as they drifted toward the emplacements. It was difficult to believe that these weird metal things were containers for human beings.

In ages to come, in scenes like these, men would sicken and madden and die just as the crews of tempest-driven barques have gripped insanity in the ages past.

Angel plowed through pumice and climbed the final bastion of the emplacement.

The great pilotless missile was shielded by an overhanging cliff against all but a freak meteor. Through a small opening this sleek white tube could fly, rushing to the execution of perhaps a million human beings. It stood quietly, waiting. It had 

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