enrose noted
that he was marked, like this," and the American sketched a cabalistic
design.

"What!" Baxter exclaimed. "An adept of North Polar Jupiter--_then_?"

"Yes. That was before the First Jovian War, you know, and it was those
medicine-men--really high-caliber scientists--that prolonged that war
so...."

"But I say, Penrose, that's really a bit thick. When they were wiped out
it was proved a lot of hocus-pocus...."

"_If_ they were wiped out," Penrose interrupted in turn. "Some of it may
have been hocus-pocus, but most of it certainly was not. I'm not asking
you to believe anything except that one fact; I'm just telling you the
rest of it. But it is also a fact that those adepts knew things and did
things that take a lot of explaining. Now for the gossip, none of which
is guaranteed. Roger is supposed to be of Tellurian parentage, and the
story is that his father was a moon-pirate, his mother a Greek
adventuress. When the pirates were chased off the moon they went to
Ganymede, you know, and some of them were captured by the Jovians. It
seems that Roger was born at an instant of time sacred to the adepts, so
they took him on. He worked his way up through the Forbidden Society as
all adepts did, by various kinds of murder and job lots of assorted
deviltries, until he got clear to the top--the seventy-seventh
mystery...."

"The secret of eternal youth!" gasped Baxter, awed in spite of himself.

"Right, and he stayed Chief Devil, in spite of all the efforts of all
his ambitious sub-devils to kill him, until the turning-point of the
First Jovian War. He cut away then in a space-ship, and ever since then
he has been working--and working hard--on some stupendous plan of his
own that nobody else has ever got even an inkling of. That's the story.
True or not, it explains a lot of things that no other theory can touch.
And now I think you'd better shuffle along; enough of this is a great
plenty!"

Baxter went to his own cubby, and each man of gray Roger's cold-blooded
crew methodically took up his task. True to prediction, in five days a
planet loomed beneath them and their vessel settled through a reeking
atmosphere toward a rocky and forbidding plain. Then for hours they
plunged along, a few thousand feet above the surface of that strange
world, while Roger with his analytical detectors sought the most
favorable location from which to wrest the materials necessary for his
program of construction.

It was a wor