ammed it over! And in the light that
followed he saw only empty, terraced walls where nothing moved, and a
lava floor below that, for an instant, gaped open, then again was smooth
and firm.

And the thunder of his ship's exhausts came back to him from those
threatening walls to tell of a loneliness more certain and terrible than
any solitude he had found in the silence where he had waited above.

But through all his dismay ran an undercurrent of puzzled wonderment.
For here on a dead world, where all men agreed there could be no life,
he had seen the impossible.

Only one glimpse before the light had died; only for an instant had he
seen the things that leaped upon Chet--but he knew! Never again could
any man tell Spud O'Malley that the Moon was a lifeless globe ... and he
knew that the life was of a form monstrous and horrible and malign!

CHAPTER V

_"And I've Brought You to This!"_

The master pilot, when he stepped forth upon that weird globe which was
the Moon, found himself plunged into a spectral world. Even from within
the air-tight suit, through whose helmet-glass he peered, he sensed, as
he had not when inside the ship, the vast desolation, the frozen
emptiness of this rocky waste.

His suit of woven metal was lined throughout with heavy fabric of
insuline fibers, that strange product brought from the jungle heat of
the upper Amazon to keep out the bitter cold of this frozen world. His
ship was felted with the same material between its double walls; without
it there would have been no resisting the cold of these interstellar
reaches.

But, despite the padding within his suit, he felt the numbing cold of
this dead world strike through. And the bleak and frigid barrenness that
met his gaze was so implacably hostile to any living thing as to bring a
shudder of more than physical cold.

No warming sun, as yet, reflected from the rocks. About him was the
blackness of a fire-formed lithosphere, whose lighter veining and
occasional ashy fields were made ghostly in the earthlight.

One slow, all-seeing glance at this!--one moment of wondering amazement
when he tilted his head far back that he might look up to the mouth of
the crater and see, in a dead-black sky, the great crescent of earth--a
vast, incredible moon peeping over the serrate edge. Then, as if the
interval of time since leaving the ship had been measured in hours
instead of brief seconds, he remembered the flashing lights that had
sig