ith the Earthlight and illumine
these massive crags of the Archimedes walls. But no speck appeared to
tell us that the ship was up there.

We were on the curving side of the Archimedes wall which fronted the
Mare Imbrium to the North. The plains lay like a great frozen sea,
congealed ripples shining in the light of the Earth, with dark
patches to mark the hollows. Somewhere down there--six or eight
thousand feet below us now, or even more than that, for all I could
tell--Miko's encampment lay concealed. We searched for lights of it,
but could see none.

Or had Miko rejoined his party, left his camp and come here like
ourselves to climb Archimedes? Or was our assumption wholly
wrong--perhaps the brigand ship would not land near here at all?

Sweeping around from the Mare Imbrium, the plains were less
smooth--the shattered, crag-littered, crater-scarred region beyond
which the distant Apennines raised their terraced walls. The little
crater which concealed the Grantline camp was off that way. There was
nothing to mark it from here.

"Gregg, do you see anything up there? There seems to be a blur."

* * * * *

Her sight, sharper than mine, had picked it out. The descending
brigand ship! A faintest tiny blur against the stars, a few of them
occulted as though strangely an invisible shadow were upon them. A
growing shadow, materializing into a blur--a blob, a shape faintly
defined. Then sharper until we were sure of what we saw. It was the
brigand ship. It came dropping slowly, silently down.

We crouched on the little ledge. A cave-mouth was behind us. A gully
was beside us, a break in the ledge; and at our feet the wall dropped
sheer.

We had extinguished our little lights. We crouched, silently gazing up
into the stars.

The ship, when first we distinguished it was central over Archimedes.
We thought for a while that it might descend into the crater. But it
did not; it came sailing forward.

I whispered into the audiphone--whispering by instinct, as though out
here in all this airless desolation someone might overhear us!

"It's coming over the crater."

Her hand pressed my arm in answer.

I recalled that when, from the _Planetara_, Miko had forced Snap to
signal this brigand band on Mars, Miko's only information as to the
whereabouts of the Grantline camp was that it lay between Archimedes
and the Apennines. That was Grantline's first message to us, and Miko
had relayed it