young man was
cautiously gazing. He had seen Migul make off; he saw, doubtless, Mary
and me at the window of this other cage five hundred feet away. He
came cautiously out from the doorway. He was a small, slim young man,
bareheaded, with a pallid face. His black garments were edged with
white, and he seemed unarmed. He hesitated, took a step or two
forward, stopped and stood cautiously peering. In the silence I could
have shouted a warning. But I did not dare. It would have meant Mary's
and my death.

She clung to me. "George, shall we?" she asked.

Harl came slowly forward. Then suddenly from the room behind us there
was a stab of light. It leaped knee-high past us, out through our door
across the glade--a tiny pencil-point of light so brilliantly
blue-white that it stabbed through the bright sunlight unfaded. It
went over Harl's head, but instantly bent down and struck upon him.
There it held the briefest of instants, then was gone.

Harl stood motionless for a second; then his legs bent and he fell.
The sunlight shone full on his crumpled body. And as I stared in
horror, I saw that he was not quite motionless. Writhing? I thought
so: a death agony. Then I realized it was not that.

"Mary, don't--don't look!" I said.

There was no need to tell her. She huddled beside me, shuddering, with
her face pressed against my shoulder.

The body of Harl lay in a crumpled heap. But the clothes were sagging
down. The flesh inside them was melting.... I saw the white face
suddenly leprous; putrescent.... All in this moment, within the
clothes, the body swiftly, decomposed.

In the sunlight of the glade lay a sagging heap of black and white
garments enveloping the skeleton of what a moment before had been a
man!

_(To be continued.)_

When the Moon Turned Green

_By Hal K. Wells_

[Illustration: _The monster whirled to confront Dixon._]

[Sidenote: Outside his laboratory Bruce Dixon finds a world of living
dead men--and above, in the sky, shines a weird green moon.]

It was nearly midnight when Bruce Dixon finished his labors and
wearily rose from before the work-bench of his lonely mountain
laboratory, located in an abandoned mine working in Southern Arizona.

He looked like some weirdly garbed monk of the Middle Ages as he
stretched his tall, lithe figure. His head was completely swathed in a
hood of lead-cloth, broken only by twin eyeholes of green glass. The
hood merged into a long-sleeved tunic of th