his
blood-thirsty god.

The arena filled with abominable life. Now, in the dark silence of a
moonless night, the cold stars shone down on a gathering of spectators,
wild and unreal--nameless, spectral horrors of a blood-chilling dream.

The flat capstone of the pyramid was the resting place of the "Master";
his huge head showed pulpy and gray above the glittering gold of the
metal carrying-chair where a misshapen body was seated. Others like him
had poured from the pyramid, carried by thousands of slaves to their
places about the arena.

Monsters of prodigious strength, their forebears must have been, but
this degenerate product of evolutionary forces had lost all firmness of
flesh. Their bodies, sacrificed for the development of the bulbous
heads, were mere appendages, fit only for the propagation of their kind
and for the digestion of human food.

* * * * *

The clean air of night was polluted with abominable odors as it swept
over the exudations of those glistening, pulpy masses. To the two
waiting humans on the great sacrificial stone came a deadening of the
senses, as an executioner, armed with strange torturing instruments,
drew near. But, of the two, one, clinging hopelessly to the other,
abruptly stifled the dry choking sobs in her throat to lift her head in
sharp, listening alertness.

Walt Harkness was speaking in a dead, emotionless tone:

"Chet has failed us; he is probably dead. Good-by, dear--"

But his words were interrupted and smothered by a breathless, strangling
voice. Diane Delacouer, staring with agonized eyes into the night was
calling to him:

"Listen! Oh, listen! It's the ship, Walter! It's the ship! It's not the
wind! I'm not dreaming nor insane!--Chet is coming with the ship!"

It was as well that Chet Bullard could not see the two, could not hear
that voice, trembling and vibrant with an impossible, heart-gripping
hope; and surely it was well that he could not share their emotions
when, for them, the silence became faintly resonant, when the distant,
humming, drumming reverberation grew to a nerve-shattering roar, when
the black night was ripped apart by the passage of a meteor-ship that
shrieked and thundered through the screaming air close above the arena,
while, with the rock beneath them still shuddering from the blasting
voice of that full exhaust, the sky above burst into dazzling flame.

* * * * *

For Chet in