"Oh, it's hideous!" she exclaimed. "I thought that it would improve as
we got closer, but the plainer we can see it, the worse it gets. Just to
think of human beings, even such cold-blooded ones as those over there,
living upon such a horrible moon and _liking_ it, gives me the blue
shivers!"

"It's pretty bleak, no fooling," he admitted, and peered through the
eyepiece of the visiray telescope, studying minutely the forbidding
surface of the satellite they were so rapidly approaching.

Larger and larger it loomed, a cratered, jagged globe of desolation
indescribable; of sheer, bitter cold incarnate and palpable; of stark,
sharp contrasts. Gigantic craters, in whose yawning depths no spark of
warmth had been generated for countless cycles of time, were surrounded
by vast plains eroded to the dead level of a windless sea. Every lofty
object cast a sharply outlined shade of impenetrable blackness, beside
which the weak light of the sun became a dazzling glare. The ground was
either a brilliant white or an intense black, unrelieved by half-tones.

"I can't hand it much, either, Nadia, but it's all in the way you've
been brought up, you know. This is home to them, and just to look at
Tellus would give them the pip. Ha! Here's something you'll like, even
if it does look so cold that it makes me feel like hugging a couple of
heater coils. It's Barkovis' city the one we're heading for, I think.
It's close enough now so that we can get it on the plate," and he set
the communicator beam upon the metropolis of Titan.

"Why, I don't see a thing, Steve--where and what is it?" They were
dropping vertically downward toward the center of a vast plain of white,
featureless and desolate; and Nadia stared in disappointment.

"You'll see directly--it's too good to spoil by telling you what to look
for or wh...."

"Oh, there it is!" she cried. "It _is_ beautiful, Steve, but how
frightfully, utterly cold!"

* * * * *

A flash of prismatic color had caught the girl's eye, and, one
transparent structure thus revealed to her sight, there had burst into
view a city of crystal. Low buildings of hexagonal shape, arranged
in irregularly variant hexagonal patterns, extended mile upon mile.
From the roofs of the structures lacy spires soared heavenward;
inter-connected by long, slim cantilever bridges whose prodigious
spans seemed out of all proportion to the gossamer delicacy of their
construction. Buildi