light came from the Earth, was plainly a vast expanse of blackened
rock. An immense depression, like the bottom of some earlier sea, it was
heaved into corrugations that Chet knew would be mountain-high at close
range. Marked with the orifices of what once had been volcanoes, the
floor of that Lake of Death was hundreds of miles in extent.

But as for seas and lakes, there was no sign of water in the whole,
vast, desolate globe. An unlikely place, Chet admitted, for the
beginning of their search, and yet--those flashes of light!--the S O S!
They had been real!

The bow blast had been roaring for over an hour; their strong
deceleration made the forward part of the ship seem "down." And down it
was, too, by reason of the pull of the great globe they were
approaching. But the roaring exhaust up ahead was checking their speed;
Chet measured and timed the apparent growth of the Moon-disk and nodded
his satisfaction at their reduced speed.

"This will stop us," he said. "I didn't know but we would have to swing
off, shoot past, and return under control. But we're all right, and
there is the place we are looking for--the big ring of Hercules, the
level floor of rock inside it. And over at one side the smaller
crater--"

* * * * *

He was gazing entranced at the mammoth circle that had been a volcano's
throat--the very one he had seen flashed on the screen. He moved the
control to open a side exhaust and change their direction of fall. He
was still staring, with emotions too overwhelming for words, and Spud
O'Malley was silent beside him, as the great ring spread out and became
an up-thrust circle of torn, jagged mountains some thirty or more miles
across and directly below.

They fell softly into that circle. Its mountainous sides were high; they
blocked off the view of the enormous terraces beyond that had been the
crater's sloping sides.

From the direction that had suddenly become "east," the rising sun's
strong light struck in a slant to make the bar rocks seem incandescent.
On one side the giant rim of the encircling mountains was black with
shadow. The shadow reached out across the vast, rocky floor almost to
the foot of the opposite wall many miles away. It enveloped their
falling ship like a cushioning, ethereal sea: velvety, softly black,
almost palpable.

It was wrapping them about in the darkness of night as Chet's slender
hand touched so delicately upon the ball-control--che