cked them, eased
off, drew back again until the thundering exhausts echoed softly where
their ship hung suspended a hundred feet above a rocky floor. The
shrouding darkness erased the harsh contours of mountain and plain; it
seemed shielding this place of desolation and horror from critical,
perhaps unfriendly eyes of these beings from another world. And Chet
laid their ship down gently and silently on the earthlit plain as if he,
too, felt this sense of intrusion--as if there might be those who would
resent the trespass of unwanted guests.

But Spud O'Malley must have experienced no such delicacy of feeling. He
let go one long pent-up breath.

"And may the saints protect us!" he said. "The Lake of Death outside,
and inside here is purgatory itself, or I don't know my geography. But
you made it, Chet, me bhoy; you made it! What a sweet little pilot you
are!"

* * * * *

"There's air here," Chet was telling his companion later; "air of a
sort, but it's no good to us."

He pointed to the spectro-analyzer with its groupings of lines and light
bands. "Carbon dioxide," he explained, "and some nitrogen, but mighty
little of either. See the pressure gage; it's way down.

"But that won't bother us too much. We've got some suits stowed away in
the supplies that will hold an atmosphere of pressure, and their oxygen
tanks will do the rest. We were ready for anything we might find on our
Dark Moon trip, but we didn't need them there. Now they'll come in
handy."

"That's all right," O'Malley assured him; "I've gone down under water in
a diving suit; I've gone outside a ship for emergency repairs in a suit
like yours when the air was as thin as this; I can stand it either way.
But what I want to know is this:

"What the divil chance is there of findin' your man, Haldgren, in such
a frozen corner of purgatory as this? How could he live here? Here
you've come in a fine, big ship, and his was a little bit of a bullet by
comparison. Yet I doubt if you could live here for five years with all
your big oxygen supply. Now, how could he have done it with his little
outfit?

"And what has he eaten? Does this look like a likely place for shootin'
rabbits, I ask you? Can a man catch a mess of fish in that empty Lake of
Death? Or did Haldgren bring a sandwich with him, it may be?"

* * * * *

Chet Bullard shook his head doubtfully.

"Don't get sarcastic!" he grinned. "Y