Dark
Moon.

* * * * *

It was as well, perhaps, that Chet did not have the power of distant
sight, that he had no messenger like those from the pyramid who might
have gone down in that place and have sent him by mental television a
picture of what was there. For he would have seen that which could have
lent no clarity of vision to his deep-sunk eyes nor skill to the touch
of fumbling, tired hands.

Walt Harkness, no longer under hypnotic control, stood in a dim-lit room
carved from solid stone; stood, and stared despairingly at the
surrounding walls and at the pair of giant ape-men who guarded the one
doorway. And, clinging to his hand, was a girl; and she, too, had been
released from the invisible bonds. She was speaking:

"No, Walter; we both saw it; it must be true. It was Chet's pistol; he
was there in that horrible place. And I will not give up. He will save
us at the last; I know it! He will save us from the inhuman cruelty of
those terrible things. He shoots straight, Chet does; and he will give
us a bullet apiece from the gun--the last kindly act of a friend. That's
what the signal meant."

"Then why did he wait! Why didn't he do it then?" Walt Harkness had made
the same demand a hundred times.

And Diane answered as always: "I don't know, Walter, I--don't--know."

Chet, cursing insanely at strange machines--equilibrators that
controlled the longitudinal and transverse and rotative stability of the
ship and that refused to take their electrical charge--knew with
horrible certainty that the last night had come. But to the two humans,
in the depths of this world where all knowledge of time was lost, the
knowledge came only when they were dragged by their guards into a
familiar room.

* * * * *

Ape-men were all about; they stared unwinkingly at the captives who
stared back again in an effort to keep their eyes averted from the
monstrous repulsiveness on the platform above them, till their eyes were
drawn to meet the compelling gaze of the "Master" of a lost race.

A something which, at first glance, seemed all head--this was the
"Master." The naked body, so skeleton-thin, was shrunken and distorted;
it was withered and leathery-brown, like the aged parchment of mummified
flesh. It was seated in a resplendent chair, whose radiating handles
were for its carrying; and, above it, the head, so incredibly repulsive,
was made more hideous by its t