the pillar of flame came to
their ears. There were other sounds as well; the babble of alien voices
and the rumble of drums.

Immediately the rough ground in the vicinity was filled with creatures
of human mold, half naked red-skinned beings that rose up from behind
the boulders and rushed toward the pit of fire and the uncanny heat
mantle that wandered ghost-like along its rim. Two of them carried
something between them, a struggling writhing something which they stood
erect at the crater's edge. It was a girl!--a slim, bronzed figure that
swayed there an instant uncertainly as the throb of the drums rose high
and the voices of the assembled savages swelled in a monotony of
exultant chanting.

"Good Lord!" Carr gasped. "A human sacrifice!"

A quick push, a piercing scream immediately drowned out by the cries of
the multitude, and the girl was flung headlong into the welcoming folds
of the white-hot ghost-mantle which hovered there like some greedy
monster of the lava pools of Mercury. The thing closed in around the
wildly struggling body, enwrapping it with exultant constrictions of its
hell-born substance and diving, flapping, smoking heat devil, into the
flame from whence it had sprung. Mado touched a lever with quick
trembling fingers and the rulden's disk went blank.

* * * * *

Sickened by what they had seen, the two friends stared at one another,
white-faced.

"No place for us," Mado said, after a moment. "Not with Ora."

"Right!" Carr agreed grimly. "But I'd like to get in close enough to see
more of Titan. How high is this cloud layer?"

"About a mile above the surface. We can dive through and look them over;
perhaps give them a taste of the disintegrator."

"Attaboy! You took the words out of my mouth. The devils! Who'd ever
dream of such a horror in the twenty-fourth century--even out here?"

"What's the reason for this serious discussion?" The voice of Detis
broke in on them from the door of the control room.

"Plenty!" Carr exclaimed. And the Europan listened gravely as he
described the awful thing they had witnessed.

"I am not surprised," he said calmly, when the Terrestrial ended his
recital. "There are certain emanations from the mother planet that most
certainly will affect the mentality and baser instincts of a race living
within their influence. I have been studying these vibrations for
several hours."

They turned to the forward port as the scientist in