ll metal buildings, very low and squat,
like balls mashed down, flattened in a bulging disc-shape; between
them were tiny skeleton towers.

The towers, twice the height of a man, were spread at irregular
intervals in a hundred-foot circle, with a group of three or four in
the center. There seemed some twenty of them. Taut wires connected
their tops, each tower with every other, so that the wires were a
lacework above the small disc buildings. The bottoms of the towers
were grounded with electrical contacts, and every tower had a ground
connection with each other by means of cables.

Far to one side, across the bowl from us, was a single globe-dwelling
with lighted windows. From its ground doorway, a narrow metal catwalk
extended like a sidewalk on the ground, winding and branching among
the towers and discs.

This was the exterior of the Wandl gravity station. It lay silent and
dark, save for the starlight and the little lights on the towers. No
sign of humans. Then we saw movement in the globe-dwelling. A man came
to the doorway, gazed at the sky and went back.

I whispered, "Which is the best entrance to the underground rooms?"

We saw where, at several points, the winding catwalk terminated in
low, dome-like kiosks, giving ingress downward. One was on our slope
of the cauldron. "That's the one we'll try," Snap murmured.

He stopped suddenly. The top of the distant globe-dwelling was
glowing. A little round patch there was radiant, like a lighted
window. A transparent ray was coming from inside. The operators within
this globe were observing the sky, training instruments upon it, no
doubt.

And now we saw in the sky the third of those sword-like beams. It had
probably been visible there for some time but we had not noticed it.
"That's Venus," I murmured.

It seemed so. A blurred star, red in this atmosphere, was close above
the horizon. The light-beam stood out from it, sweeping up to the
zenith.

The gravity station here was about to make contact with the Venus
beam. We heard a muffled siren, a signal echoing from the subterranean
control rooms. The current went into all these wires and towers and
twenty-foot ground discs. The hissing and throbbing hum of it was
audible. The discs and towers were glowing; red at first, then violet.
Then that milky, opalescent white. The overhead wire-aerials were
snapping with a myriad of tiny jumping sparks.

I saw now that the top of each tower was a grid of radiant wi