a feeble
current still flowed along it.

After some reflection, Larry set out along the banks of the canal.

He followed it for two days.

Curious straight bars of light were visible across the sky--a band of
violet in the morning; one of crimson at evening. Their apparent
motion was in the same direction as that of the sun. The bars of
light puzzled him considerably before it occurred to him that they
must be the red and violet rays.

"So you wait till evening, and then fly up into the red ray, to go
home," he muttered. "But I may not need that information," he added
grimly. "Seems to be a pretty big job to search a planet on foot, for
one person. And I'm not going back without Agnes!"

In the afternoon of the second day, he came within view of a city. He
could discern vast, imposing walls and towers of dark stone. It stood
in the barren red desert, far back from the green line of the old
canal. Larry left the canal and started wearily across toward it. He
had covered several miles of the distance before he saw that the lofty
towers were falling, the magnificent walls crumbling. The city was
ruined, dead, deserted!

The realization brought him a great flood of despair. He had hoped to
find people--friends, from whom he might get food, and information
about this unfamiliar planet. But the city was dead.

Larry was standing there, in the midst of the vast red plain between
ruined city and ruined canal. Tired, hungry, lonely and hopeless. He
was looking up at the white "sun," trying to comfort himself with the
thought that the brilliant luminary was merely a queer blue lamp, that
he was upon a tiny experimental world in a laboratory. But the thought
brought him no relief; only confusion and a sense of incredulity.

* * * * *

Then he saw the machine-monster.

A glittering, winged thing of crystal and green metal, identical with
the one he had encountered in the laboratory. It must already have
seen him, for it was dropping swiftly toward him.

Larry started to run, took a few staggering steps. Then he recalled
the heavy rifle slung over his shoulder. Moving with desperate haste,
he got it into his hands and raised it just as the monster dropped to
the red sand a dozen yards away from him.

Steadily he covered the crystal cylinder within which the thing's
brain floated in luminous violet liquid. His finger tightened on the
trigger, ready to send a heavy bullet crashing into it.