ttlement built upon it! Hard, grayish soil, and on it several
buildings of the familiar burnished metal. And overhead, cupping the
entire outlay, arched a great hemisphere of what resembled glass, ribbed
with silvery supporting beams and struts: an enormous bowl, turned down,
and on its other side the glorious vista of space.

Straight above hung the red-belted disk of Jupiter, with the pale globes
of Satellites II and III wheeling close, _and all of them were of the
same relative size they had appeared when last seen from the Scorpion!_

Dr. Ku smiled unctuously at the puzzlement that showed on the faces of
his captives.

"Have you noticed," he asked, "that you are still in the neighborhood of
the spot in space where we had our rendezvous? But this isn't another of
Jupiter's satellites. Ah, no. This is my own world--my own personally
controlled little world!"

"Snakes of the Santo!" Friday gasped, the whites of his eyes showing all
around. "Then we must be on an asteroid!"

They were. From the far side of the dome ahead of them the asteroid
stretched back hard and sharp in Jupiter's ruddy light against the
backdrop of black space. It was a craggy, uneven body, seemingly about
twenty miles in length, pinched in the middle and thus shaped roughly
like a peanut shell. One end had been leveled off to accommodate the
dome with its cradled buildings; outside the dome all was untouched. The
landscape was a gargantuan jumble of coarse, hard, sharp rocks which had
crystallized into a maze of hollows, crevices, long crazy splits and
jagged out-thrusting lumps of boulders. Without an atmosphere, with but
the feeblest of gravities and utterly without any form of life--save for
that within the dome built upon it--it was simply a typical small
asteroid, of which race only the largest are globe-shaped.

"Once," the Eurasian went on softly as they took all this in, "this
world of mine circled with its thousands of fellows between Mars and
Jupiter. I picked it from the rest because of certain mineral qualities,
and had this air-containing dome constructed on it, and these buildings
inside the dome. Then, with batteries of gravity-plates inserted
precisely in the asteroid's center of gravity, I nullified the gravital
pull of Mars and Jupiter, wrenched it from its age-old orbit and swung
it free into space. An achievement that would command the respect even
of Eliot Leithgow, I think. So now you see, Carse; now you know. _This_
is