ked ship. The corridors were black; the hull
control-rooms were dimly illumined with Earth-light straggling through
the windows.

This littered tomb! Already cold and silent with death. We stumbled over
a fallen figure. A member of the crew.

* * * * *

Grantline straightened from examining him.

"Dead."

Earth-light fell on the horrible face. Puffed flesh, bloated red from
the blood which had oozed from its pores in the thinning air. I looked
away.

We prowled further. Hahn lay dead in the pump-room.

The body of Coniston should have been near here. We did not see it.

We climbed up to the slanting littered deck. The dome had not exploded,
but the air up here had almost all hissed away.

Again Grantline touched me. "That the turret?"

"Yes."

No wonder he asked! The wreckage was all so formless.

We climbed after Snap into the broken turret room. We passed the body of
that steward who just at the end had appealed to me and I had left
dying. The legs of the forward look-out still poked grotesquely up from
the wreckage of the observatory tower where it lay smashed down against
the roof of the chart-room.

We shoved ourselves into the turret. What was this? No bodies here! The
giant Miko was gone! The pool of his blood lay congealed into a frozen
dark splotch on the metal grid.

And Moa was gone! They had not been dead. Had dragged themselves out of
here, fighting desperately for life. We would find them somewhere around
here.

But we did not. Nor Coniston. I recalled what Anita had said: other
suits and helmets had been here in the nearby chart-room. The brigands
had taken them, and food and water doubtless, and escaped from the ship,
following us through the lower admission ports only a few minutes after
we had gone out.

* * * * *

We made careful search of the entire ship. Eight of the bodies which
should have been here were missing: Miko, Moa, Coniston, and five of the
steward-crew.

We did not find them outside. They were hiding near here, no doubt, more
willing to take their chances than to yield now to us. But how, in all
this Lunar desolation, could we hope to locate them?

"No use," said Grantline. "Let them go. If they want death--well, they
deserve it."

But we were saved. Then, as I stood there, realization leaped at me.
Saved? Were we not indeed fatuous fools?

In all these emotion-swept moments since we had encountere