g equipment lay piled in a litter.
There was a heap of discarded ore where Grantline had carted and dumped
it after his first crude refining process had yielded it as waste. The
ore-slag lay like gray powder-flakes strewn down the cliff. Tracks and
ore-carts along the ledge stood discarded, mute evidence of the weeks
and months of work these helmeted miners had undergone, struggling upon
this airless, frowning world.

But now all that was finished. The radio-active ore was sufficiently
concentrated. It lay--this treasure--in a seventy-foot pile behind the
glassite lean-to, with a cage of wires over it and an insulation barrage
guarding its Gamma rays from escaping to mark its presence.

The ore-shelter was dark; the other two buildings were lighted. And
there were small lights mounted at intervals about the camp and along
the edge of the ledge. A spider ladder, with tiny platforms some twenty
feet one above the other, hung precariously to the cliff-face. It
descended the five hundred feet to the crater floor; and, behind the
camp, it mounted the jagged cliff-face to the upper rim-height, where a
small observatory platform was placed.

* * * * *

Such was the outer aspect of the Grantline Treasure Camp near the
beginning of this Lunar night, when, unbeknown to Grantline and his
score of men, the _Planetara_ with its brigands was approaching. The
night was perhaps a sixth advanced. Full night. No breath of cloud to
mar the brilliant starry heavens. The quadrant Earth hung poised like a
giant mellow moon over Grantline's crater. A bright Earth, yet no air
was here on this Lunar surface to spread its light. Only a glow,
mingling with the spots of blue tube-light on the poles along the cliff,
and the radiance from the lighted buildings.

The crater floor was dimly purple. Beyond the opposite upper rim, from
the camp-height, the towering top of distant Archimedes was visible.

No evidence of movement showed about the silent camp. Then a pressure
door in an end of the main building opened its tiny series of locks. A
bent figure came out. The lock closed. The figure straightened and gazed
about the camp. Grotesque, bloated semblance of a man! Helmeted, with
rounded dome-hood suggestion of an ancient sea diver, yet goggled and
trunked like a gas-masked fighter of the twentieth century war.

He stooped presently and disconnected metal weights which were upon his
shoes.[E]

Then he stood ere