"Yes. She here1 never hurt her."

"Earthwomen are not always easy to manage, Dorrek."

"This one1 manage her. Besides, she like me. I want my woman yield with love, not fear. Muta beautiful once, but old now. Too much old." I forced a laugh, and he responded to it.

"Your ideas are reasonable," I agreed. "Make this Earthwoman yield with love, not fear. You can't do that all at once, Dorrek."

"Not hastemy mind now only on conquest of Mercury." He touched me. "You, Jack. Dean1 make you want to teach me the English without forcing." He was far more clever than he looked, this Dorrek. He shot me a sidewise glance.

"You want I let you loose? Then you help me?" I fancy he liked me because I was the only man near his own giant size whom he had ever seen.

He was smiling again. "You can no escape. Roc tried that.

You saw him fall? You want not death? I loose you a little.

Free to walk. Do what you likehere among us. I call you friend." Then he was unroping me. Again I had that flood of wild thoughts. I put them asideto start fighting now would only mean death for me, and possibly, Rowena.

I rolled over to help him untie me.

"Where is this Earth girl?"

"A room above. Muta with her." I sat up, rubbing my arms and legs to get the blood back into them. Dorrek watched me; then with a sudden thought, he selected a length of rope.

"Only a little loose. " Around my ankles he tied the rope so that I could take a short step and no more, and he tied my wrists about a foot apart. I could free myself, I knew. And Dorrek knew it, of course. But it would take some minutes, and I would be under constant observation.

He commented: "Just so. No sudden idea of flight. You . understand?"

"Yes." I smiled.

He watched me as I stood up shakily, stretching my legs until I could walk normally. With the lesser gravity pullit was Mercurian gravity here now1 had to be carefuL Dorrek stood beside me.

"When you hungry, you tell Muta." He laid his huge hand on my shoulder. "Too much bad, so big men like us not real friends."

"Call us that, Dorrek."

"If you real friend, sometime you talk to Rowena. Tell her Dorrek, he great man." I met his steady gaze, and it gave me a shock. There was always a naive earnestness in this burly scoundrel's manner.

I was shocked to realize now it was largely the limitations of his command of English.

"You tell her, 'Dorrek he is great man.' " He said it naively enough, but in his gaze I could not miss a hint of irony in the earnestness of his voice half-real, half-assumed. With a shock came the thought that this fellow was only malong fun of me.

And then I thought that I was mistaken. He added, "You tell Rowenasomeday I kill her and kill you if she find she cannot love me." There was no duplicity in that .speech, I was convinced! He turned and left me without waiting for my answer.

I was free now to move about the vehicle. As Dorrek passed through the interior doorway, one of his men appeared there and stood watching me. I was free to seek out Rowena. But though I longed to do it at once, caution held me. Dorrek might be listening. A surprised, incautious word from Rowena as I told her of my plan for escapeit was too dangerous a chance. I decided to wait, for a time at least. Until the vehicle landed somewhere, we could not even think of a way out.

The Mercurian in the doorway was eying me, but he did not speak. I crossed the room with my hobbled steps and stood at the window.

We were flying at an altitude of a few thousand feet. It was dark, but there was enough light for me to see the landscape beneath. It was changed from the copper uplands of the Light Country to a darker rock, sleek and glistening as though it were largely iron.

The sky was leaden. But as I gazed, with my eyes growing accustomed to it, there seemed a vague green sheen of radiance mingled with 'the clouds. Green, and occasionally dim shafts of a turgid yellow. The window was open with a small sill, breast-high, on which I leaned. A wind was outside; but I guessed it was only the creation of our forward flight. The night was breathlessoppressive. I thought suddenly of what Guy had told us about the black storms.

Was this one of them brewing now? I stood there perhaps an hour, watching the dim landscape slipping past; A dark metallic plain fluted with little rifts and gullies. It seemed steadily rising toward us. As the ball slowly turned on its axis, my view spread to the horizon over all its circle. A close upstanding horizon, black against the sky. The plain was gradually breaking into rougher ccnm"try: deeper gullies, round black pitsunfathomable emptiness downward, and little crater holes, like pockmarks.

For a time it seemed almost a Lunar landscape, as desolate, uninhabited as our frigid Moon. I saw no sign of habitation down here now.

Then, in a little valley, there seemed a huddled group of mound-shaped huts. But the village was doubtless abandoned; there were no lights, nothing moving.

We flew steadily onward. Off to one side, diagonally ahead of us against the horizon, I saw a glow of red-yellow light.

A crater pit, not dead like all the others, but with a fire in its depths. It came into closer view as we passed, a little glowing crater. It seemed almost welcome in the bleak dark desolation. It passed sidewise and went quickly down beneath the rising horizon as we advanced.

I was aware of the air growing constantly colder. And the night darker. Not so much because of the storm; we were advancing, I knew, into the region of perpetual night. The Sunif there had been no clouds to obscure itwould have been always at or beneath the horizon even at the Water City. And here, already it would have set, never to rise.

Presently, I saw mountains coming up aheadblack peaks a great line of them stretching like a wall before us. The ball began rising. The mountains loomed higher, closer.

And then we were over them. I stood amazed, awe-struck.

There is a terror to darknessthings almost, but not quite, visible. Shining Lunar mountains are bleak and desolate, but the light on them brings a grandeur to the beholder, rather than a fear. But here beneath me now was a desolation fearsome in the extreme. Black bottomless canyons, incongruously wide for the sharply convex surface of this small planet; canyons with sheer black walls dropping into blackness; peaks rising like pointed needles; open valleys strewn with crags and boulders.

A ragged, tumbled land, rent and torn by some great cataclysm of nature. Once there may have been fire here; I saw a tremendous upsloping ramp of what might have been congealed lava; a cloven rock peak loomed at its summit.

We were slamming low, and now the mountains were around us. We swung into a deep black canyon. One of its walls, glistening black, slid past my window hardly more than a hundred feet away. Gazing up, I could see its straight edge against the sky and a towering peak still higher. There seemed a white glow upon the peaksome little light catching its mantle of snow.

~ The vehicle turned on its axis. Again I could see ahead up this narrow black canyon and see its floor now, broken and rock-strewn, as we steadily ascended.

The flight of the ball seemed slowing. Ahead I saw where the canyon narrowed to a mere two hundred feet, like the neck of a bottle, beyond which it opened into a wide bowl enclosed by perpendicular, thousand-foot cliffs. We sailed through the neck, out into the open valley. I saw lights.

Dorrek's mountain stronghold lay spread here on the valley floor.

There was a step behind me. I heard a confusion of sound within the vehicle. Tramping feet. Orders. The hiss of the side rocket streamspreparations for landing.

Dorrek appeared. "We are here. You go abovefriend Jack." I followed him to the small ladder incline which led to the upper tier. It was the single connection between. the two floors of the vehicle. He pushed me. A few steps up, I turned to gaze at him. He was smiling.