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Before the Silent Death strikes you down." "I'm going to have a look at this." "You'll be killed!" Copper said. "And if you die, I die too." "Don't be foolish. There's nothing here that can hurt me. See those trees and plants growing right up to the crater's edge. If they can take it permanently, I can stand it for a few moments. If there's any radioactivity there, it's not very much."
Dabney disavows us unless we are successful. Let us let it go at that." Then he said: "The observatory's set to track?" A muffled voice said boredly, by short-wave from the observatory up on the crater's rim: "We're ready. Visual and records, and we've got the timers set to clock the auto-beacon signals as they come in." The voice was not enthusiastic.
I saw the lights of Miko's band down there. He had stopped signaling. His little lights were spread out, bobbing as he and his men advanced up the crater's foothills, coming to join the ship. I had an instant's glimpse. Anita and I could not stay here. The brigands would follow us up in a moment. I saw no exterior ladder. We would have to take our chances and jump.
"We weren't used to the show," he said. "We got all fed up at the orgy. Too much magnetism we had a sudden and violent attack of electrical indigestion. Sh-h look ahead of you." Gingerly I turned. I had been lying, I now saw, head toward and prone at the base of one of the crater's walls.
He reached the crater's edge and walked right down into it. They were out of sight of the Connies now. Rip walked up the other side of the crater until his bubble was just below ground level. The chunks of thorium he had ordered thrown in to block some of the radiation made walking a little difficult. "Santos," he said, "we're in the second crater."
Now as the broad moon rose higher I could see into the crater's depths, and this, besides being more vast, was not as the others I had seen. Its floor appeared to be quite level, and looked to be of pure white sand; but everywhere it sparkled in the bright moonlight. Diamonds surely?
Then they sang a hymn. I can fancy the strange procession winding its backward way over the cracked, hot, lava sea, the robust belief of the princess hardly sustaining the limping faith of her followers, whose fears would not be laid to rest until they reached the crater's rim without any signs of the pursuit of an avenging deity.
In the sky, through the film of shattered clay, little black dots scurried, poised, and fell again as arms and legs and head less trunks and shapeless bits of wood and iron. Scarcely had the dust settled when the sun caught the light of fifty thousand bayonets, and a hundred shells were shrieking across the crater's edge. Earth to earth, alas, and dust to dust!
The earth on the crater's rim was broken and irregular, the surface an eye-deceiving patchwork of broken light and black heavy shadow under the glare of the flying lights. The mackintosh he wore was caked and plastered with mud, and blended well with the background on which he lay.
The wind was bitterly cold, more bitter, indeed, than I have ever felt, and yet, as I stood and shivered upon the little crater's brink, fumes of sulphurous acid and smoke swept round me and made me choke. The edge of the crater was of white fired rock; inside the cup the hollow was sulphur yellow. Puffs of smoke came from cracks. I dropped out of the wind and warmed myself at the fire.
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