es that the aircars will remain where they are! Muster
inside the laboratory, keeping well away from the Master Beryl!"

Then to the people who had returned, clothed in strange radiance, from
the Moon with Sarka and with Jaska he spoke:

"Leave the cars and enter my laboratory, where further orders will be
given you!"

With Jaska still by his side, Sarka entered the laboratory through the
Exit Dome. Inside, clothing was swiftly brought for the rebels, for
Sarka and for Jaska. But, even when they were clothed, these people who
had come back seemed to glow with an inner radiance which transfigured
them.

Sarka the Second, his face drawn and pale, came from the Observatory to
meet his son, and the two were clasped in each other's arms for a
moment. Sarka the Second, who had looked no older than his son, seemed
to have aged a dozen centuries in the time Sarka had been gone.

But it was not of the threatened attack by Martians that Sarka the
Second spoke. He made no statement. He merely asked a question:

"Was Lunar very beautiful, and just a bit unearthly in appearance?"

* * * * *

Sarka started.

"Yes. Beautiful! Wondrously, fearfully beautiful: but I had the feeling
that she had no heart or soul, no conscience: that she was
somehow--well, bestial!"

A moan of anguish escaped Sarka the Second.

"Dalis again!" he ejaculated. "But much of the fault was mine! Before
you were born, we scientists of Earth had already several times realized
the necessity of expansion for the children of Earth if they were to
continue. Dalis' proposal to my father was discarded, because it
involved the wholesale taking of life. But after the oceans had been
obliterated, and the human family still outgrew its bounds, Dalis came
to my father and me with still another proposal. It involved a strange,
other-worldly young woman whom he called Lunar! Her family--well,
nothing was known about her, for her family could not be traced. Wiped
out, I presume, in some inter-family quarrel, leaving her alone. Dalis
found her, took an interest in her, and the very strangeness of her gave
him his idea, which he brought to my father and me.

"His proposal was somewhat like that which you made when we sent the
Earth out of its orbit into outer space, save that Dalis' scheme
involved no such program. His was simply a proposal to somehow
communicate with the Moon by the use of an interplanetary rocket that
should carry