ound not devoted to
their incredible agriculture were needed to house the inhabitants. The
ground about them was alive with an equally incredible humanity that
swarmed over all this world in appalling profusion.

Their horrid flesh! Their hideous features! And their number! McGuire
had a sudden, sickening thought. They were larvae, these crawling
hordes--vile worm-things that infested a beautiful world--that bred here
in millions, their numbers limited only by the space for their bodies
and the food for their stomachs. And he, McGuire, a _man_--he and this
other man with his clear-thinking scientific brain were prisoners to
this horde; captives, to be used or butchered by those vile, crawling
things!

And again it was this world of contrast that drove home the conviction
with its sickening certainty. A world of beauty, of delicate colors, of
sweeping oceans and gleaming shores and towering cities with their grace
and beauty and elfin splendor yet a world that shuddered beneath this
devouring plague of grublike men.

* * * * *

They swept past cities and towns and over many miles of open land before
their craft swung eastward toward the dark horizon. The master gave
another order into the speaking tube and their ship shot forward, faster
and yet faster, with a speed that pressed them heavily into their seats.
Behind them was the glory of the sunlit clouds; ahead the gloomy
gray-black masses that must make a stygian night sky over this lonely
world--a world cut off by that vaporous shell from all communion with
the stars.

They were over the water; before them a dark ocean reached out in
forbidding emptiness to a darker horizon. Ahead, the only broken line in
the vast level expanse was a mountain rising abruptly from the sea. It
was a volcanic cone surmounting an island; the sunlight's glow reflected
from behind them against the sombre mass that lifted toward the clouds.
Their ship was high enough to clear it, but instead it swung, as McGuire
watched, toward the south.

The island drifted past, and again they were on their course. But to
the flyer there were significant facts that could not pass unobserved.
Their own ship had swung in a great circle to avoid this mountain. And
all through the skies were others that did the same. The air above and
about the grim sentinel peak was devoid of flying shapes.

McGuire caught the eyes of the councilor, their keeper. "What is that?"
he aske