brilliant purplish light upon
a world of water. Not a cloud was to be seen in that flaming sky, and
through that dustless atmosphere the eye could see the horizon--a
horizon three times as distant as the one to which we are
accustomed--with a distinctness and clarity impossible in our Terra's
dust-filled air. As that mighty sun dropped below the horizon the sky
would fill suddenly with clouds and rain would fall violently and
steadily until midnight. Then the clouds would vanish as suddenly as
they had come into being, the torrential downpour would cease, and,
through that huge world's wonderfully transparent, gaseous envelope, the
full glory of the firmament would be revealed. Not the firmament as we
know it--for that hot blue sun and Nevia, her one planet-child, were
many light-years distant from Old Sol and his numerous brood--but a
strange and glorious firmament containing not one constellation familiar
to earthly eyes.

[Illustration:

Many bridges and more tubes extended through the air
from building to building, and the watery "streets" teemed
with surface craft, and with submarines.]

Out of the vacuum of space a fish-shaped vessel of the void--the vessel
that was shortly to attack so boldly both the massed fleet of
Triplanetary and Roger's planetoid--plunged into the rarefied outer
atmosphere, and crimson beams of force tore shriekingly the thin air as
it braked its terrific speed. A third of the circumference of Nevia's
mighty globe was traversed before the velocity of the craft could be
reduced sufficiently to make a landing possible. Then, approaching the
twilight zone, the vessel dived vertically downward, and it became
evident that Nevia was neither entirely aqueous nor devoid of
intelligent life. For the blunt nose of the space-ship was pointing
toward what was evidently a half-submerged city, a city whose buildings
were flat-topped, hexagonal towers, exactly alike in size, shape, color,
and material. These buildings were arranged as the cells of a honeycomb
would be if each cell were separated from its neighbors by a relatively
narrow channel of water, and all were built of the same white metal.
Many bridges and more tubes extended through the air from building to
building, and the watery "streets" teemed with surface craft, and with
submarines.

The pilot, stationed immediately below the conical prow of the
space-ship, peered intently through the thick windows of crystal-clear
metal