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Updated: June 11, 2025
Its tiny hull windows were dark; but the blurred shape of the hull was visible, and above it the rounded cap of dome, with a dim radiance beneath it. We followed Grantline's platform. It was rising, drawing the others after it like a tail. I touched Anita where she lay beside me with her head half in the small hooded control bank. "Going too high." She nodded, but followed the line nevertheless.
The third building seemed a lean-to banked against the cliff wall, a slanting shed-wall of glassite fifty feet high and two hundred in length. Under it, for months Grantline's bores had dug into the cliff. Braced tunnels were here, penetrating back and downward into the vein of rock. The work was over. The borers had been dismantled and packed away.
"Gregg, if they are listening " I pushed her away. This brave little masquerader! Not for my life, or for all the lives on the ship, would I consciously have endangered her. "But Grantline's findings!" I said aloud. "In his message see here, Prince " Coniston was too far away on the deck to hear us. Anita went to my door again and waved at him reassuringly.
I could not help noticing Sir Arthur Coniston's queer look, and I have never seen so keen a glance as Rance Rankin shot at me. Were all three people aware of Grantline's treasure on the Moon? It suddenly seemed so. I wished fervently at that instant that the ten days of this voyage were over. Captain Carter was right. Coming back we should have a cordon of Interplanetary Police aboard.
Our mirror grid gave the magnified images; the spectro, with its wave length selection, pictured the mountain levels and slowly descended into the deepest seas. There was nothing. Yet in those Moon caverns a million million recesses amid the crags of that tumbled, barren surface the pin point of movement which might have been Grantline's expedition could so easily be hiding!
It had not been difficult for the flying platforms to hunt down the attacking brigands on the open rocks. We had only lost one more platform. Human hearts beat sometimes with very selfish emotions. It was a triumphant ending for us, and we hardly gave a thought that half of Grantline's men had perished. We huddled on Snap's platform. It rose, lurching drunkenly barely carrying us.
Gregg Haljan was aware that there was a certain danger in having the giant spaceship Planetara stop off at the moon to pick up Grantline's special cargo of moon ore. For that rare metal invaluable in keeping Earth's technology running was the target of many greedy eyes. But nevertheless he hadn't figured on the special twist the clever Martian brigands would use.
Such was the outer aspect of the Grantline Treasure Camp near the beginning of this Lunar night, when, unknown to Grantline and his men, the Planetara with its brigands was approaching. The night was perhaps a sixth advanced. Full night. No breath of cloud to mar the brilliant starry heavens. The quadrant Earth hung poised like a giant mellow moon over Grantline's crater.
"Twenty or thirty thousand miles up, probably." The stars and the Earth were visible over us. Somewhere up there, disclosed by Grantline's instruments but not yet discernible to the naked eye, Miko's reinforcements were hovering. We lay for a moment in silence. It was horribly nerve straining. Miko could be creeping up on us. Would he dare chance my sudden fire?
But they only waved at us, skimming down the length of the corridor, seeming to avoid a smash a dozen times by the smallest margin of chance, stopping miraculously at the further end, hanging poised in mid-air, wheeling, coming back, undulating up and down. Grantline clung to me. "By the gods of the airways!" In spite of my astonished horror, I could not but share Grantline's admiration.
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