ou can't think of any wilder
questions than I have asked myself.

"He couldn't have lived here, Spud; that's the only answer. It just
isn't humanly possible. All I know is that he did it. I can't tell you
how I know it, but I do. Those lights were a human call for help. No
living man but Haldgren could have flashed them. He's alive--or he was
then; that's all I know."

Spud crossed the control room as he had done a score of times to look
through a glass port at the world outside. Chet, too, turned to the
lookout by which he stood and stared through it. The men had found
themselves surprisingly light within the ship. They had been compelled
to guard against sudden motion; a step, instead of carrying them one
stride, might hurl them the length of the room. This lowered
gravitational pull helped to explain to the pilot that outer world.

There, close by, was the rocky plain on which he had landed the ship:
Smooth and shiny as obsidian in places, again it was spongy gray, the
color of volcanic rock, bubbling with imprisoned gases at the instant
of hardening. It stretched out and down, that gently rolling plain, for
a thousand yards or more, then ended in a welter of nightmare forms done
in stone. It was like the work of some demented sculptor's tortured
brain.

* * * * *

Jutting tongues of rock stood in air for a hundred--two hundred--feet.
Chet hardly dared estimate size in this place where all was so strange
and unearthly. The hot rock had spouted high in the thin air, and it had
frozen as it threw itself frantically out from the inferno of heat that
had given it birth. The jets sprayed out like spume-topped waves; they
were whipped into ribbons that the winds of this world could not tear
down, and the ribbons shone, waving white in the earthlight. The
tortured stone was torn and ripped into twisted contortions whose very
writhing told of the hell this had been. Its grotesque horror struck
through to the deeper levels of Chet's mind with a feeling he could not
have depicted in words.

From the higher elevation where their ship lay he could look out and
across this welter of storm-lashed rock to see it level off, then vanish
where another crater mouth yawned black. Here was the inner crater! It
had seemed small before; it was huge now--a place of mystery, a black,
waiting throat into which Chet knew he must go--a place of indefinable
terror.

But it was the place, too, whence strang