So it was, ironically enough, that Stephen Dietrich—whose memory was gone completely—again took up the trail of Doctor Karl Von Mark, last of the Axis criminals at large. The trail that had led the red-haired young American flier from rebuilding Greece into Africa and the hidden valley where Doctor Von Mark worked feverishly to restore the crumbled structure of Nazidom, and then had sent him hurtling spaceward in the second of the Doctor's crude space-ships was now drawing to an end. The Doctor and the young American pilot were both trapped here on this little blob of cosmic matter that hides beyond the Moon's cratered bulk.
The Doctor's ship had landed safely on Sekk, the wily scientist preferring the lesser gravity of this fertile world to that of the lifeless Moon in the event that he returned again to Earth, but Dietrich's spacer had crashed.
Two words linked Noork with the past, the two words that the Vasads had slurred into his name: New York. And the battered wrist watch, its crystal and hands gone, were all that remained of his Earthly garb.
Noork paddled the long flat dugout strongly away from the twilight shore toward the shadowy loom of the central island. Though he could not remember ever having held a paddle before he handled the ungainly blade well.
After a time the clumsy prow of the craft rammed into a yielding cushion of mud, and Noork pulled the dugout out of the water into the roofing shelter of a clump of drooping trees growing at the water's edge.
Sword in hand he pushed inward from the shore and ended with a smothered exclamation against an unseen wall. Trees grew close up to the wall and a moment later he had climbed out along a horizontal branch beyond the wall's top, and was lowering his body with the aid of a braided leather rope to the ground beyond.
He was in a cultivated field his feet and hands told him. And perhaps half a mile away, faintly illumined by torches and red clots of bonfires, towered a huge weathered white skull!
Secure in the knowledge that he wore the invisible robes of a Misty One he found a solitary tree growing within the wall and climbed to a comfortable crotch. In less than a minute he was asleep.
"The new slave," a rough voice cut across his slumber abruptly, "is the daughter of Tholon Dist the merchant."