for his long dead body.

"Come on, dear," said he, and side by side they swam over to it.

He helped her up the ship's ladder. The ship's cook sleepily stuck his
head out of the galley door.

"Hullo, Mike," sang out George Abbot merrily to the astonished man.
"I've brought company for breakfast. And there'll be two more when we
can lower a boat."

[Illustration: Advertisement]

Brood of the Dark Moon

(_A Sequel to "Dark Moon"_)

BEGINNING A FOUR-PART NOVEL

_By Charles Willard Diffin_

[Illustration: _He landed one blow on the nearest face._]

[Sidenote: Once more Chet, Walt and Diane are united in a wild ride to
the Dark Moon--but this time they go as prisoners of their deadly
enemy Schwartzmann.]

CHAPTER I

_The Message_

In a hospital in Vienna, in a room where sunlight flooded through
ultra-violet permeable crystal, the warm rays struck upon smooth walls
the color of which changed from hot reds to cool yellow or gray or to
soothing green, as the Directing Surgeon might order. An elusive
blending of tones, now seemed pulsing with life; surely even a
flickering flame of vitality would be blown into warm livingness in
such a place.

Even the chart case in the wall glittered with the same clean,
brilliant hues from its glass and metal door. The usual revolving
paper disks showed white beyond the glass. They were moving; and the
ink lines grew to tell a story of temperature and respiration and of
every heart-beat.

On the identification-plate a name appeared and a date: "Chet
Bullard--23 years. Admitted: August 10, 1973." And below that the
ever-changing present ticked into the past in silent minutes: "August
15, 1973; World Standard Time: 10:38--10:39--10:40--"

For five days the minutes had trickled into a rivulet of time that
flowed past a bandaged figure in the bed below--a silent figure and
unmoving, as one for whom time has ceased. But the surgeons of the
Allied Hospital at Vienna are clever.

10:41--10:42--The bandaged figure stirred uneasily on a snow-white
bed....

* * * * *

A nurse was beside him in an instant. Was her patient about to recover
consciousness? She examined the bandages that covered a ragged wound
in his side, where all seemed satisfactory. To all appearances the man
who had moved was unconscious still; the nurse could not know of the
thought impressions, blurred at first, then gradually clearing, that
were flashing through hi