* * *

I stood cold and numbed. And realization came at last. The faint
zed-light glow had fallen by chance upon Anita's face. Penetrated the
flesh; exposed, faintly glowing, the bone-line of her jaw. Unmasked the
waxen art of Glutz.

And Miko had seen it.

"Why George, how surprising! Away with that cloak!"

He seized her wrist, drew her forward, beyond the shaft of zed-light,
into the brilliant light of the Moon. And ripped her cloak from her. The
gentle curves of her woman's figure were so unmistakable!

And as Miko gazed at them, all his calm triumph swept away.

"Why, Anita!"

I heard Moa mutter: "So that is it?" A venomous flashing look--a shaft
from me to Anita and back again. "So that is it?"

"Why, _Anita_!"

Miko's great arms gathered her up as though she were a child. "So I have
you back; from the dead delivered back to me!"

"Gregg!" Snap's warning, and his grip over my shoulders brought me a
measure of sanity. I had tensed to spring. I stood quivering, and Moa
thrust her weapon against my face. The helio mirrors were swaying again
with another message from Grantline. But it came ignored by us all.

In the glare of moonlight by the forward window, Miko held Anita, his
great hands pawing her with triumphant possessive caresses.

"So, little Anita, you are given back to me."

Against her futile struggles he held her.

Dear God, if only I had had the wit to have prevented this!

CHAPTER XX

_The Grantline Camp_

In the mid-northern hemisphere upon the Earthward side of the Moon, the
giant crater of Archimedes stood brooding in silent majesty. Grim, lofty
walls, broken, pitted and scarred, rising precipitous to the upper
circular rim. Night had just fallen. The sunlight clung to the
crater-heights; it tinged with flame the jagged peaks of the Apennine
Mountains which rose in tiers at the horizon; and it flung great inky
shadows over the intervening lowlands.

Northward, the Mare Imbrium stretched mysterious and purple, its million
rills and ridges and crater holes flattened by distance and the
gathering darkness into a seeming level surface. The night slowly
deepened. The dead-black vault of the sky blazed with its brilliant
starry gems. The gibbous Earth hung high above the horizon, motionless,
save for the invisible pendulum sway over the tiny arc, of its
libration: widening to quadrature, casting upon the bleak naked Lunar
landscape its mellow Earth-glow.

Slow