Masson sent Dillen, Marcy, Reppart, and Dolan back to report to the settlement at New Crayton. He advised that as many families as possible be ferried across the sea to Tular. Here on the upper plateau would be their new world.
The day after the four messengers had left they came to the God-From-The-Clouds.
An ancient crater housed the god, a low-rimmed bowl five miles in diameter. The jungle had crept over the outer walls and far down the inner slopes to the edge of the lake within. The trail they followed ended abruptly at a cliff on whose brink a triangular block of greenish-black basalt rested. There were mounds of rounded white objects, human skulls, about the rough altar, but the broken white skeletons of the sacrifices lay thick about the god far below.
Irene shuddered. She hid her head on Masson's chest. "The brides of their god," she sobbed, "brides of the machine."
The god of the Butrads of Venus was a huge crumpled ball of metal—a space ship from some distant world!
A distant and alien world the battered craft must have come from, for the corridors and cabins were too small for the froglike bodies of the Earthmen to pass. Yet the space ship was gigantic by any standard—a quarter of a mile in diameter. There were strange corroded weapons and machines whose use the Earthmen could not fathom. There was sealed cargo—food that even yet was edible after long years of exposure to the heat and humidity of the Venusian upland.
The ship was a veritable storehouse of precious metals and equipment. Ellis set to work at once designing a dynamo and drew plans for a machine shop to be set up in a nearby cavern. Masson took two of the men and examined the defensive possibilities of the crater's upper rim—he feared the reaction of the Frogs when they learned of this desecration of the God-From-The-Clouds. Irene put two of the men at work clearing out another cave for a kitchen and sleeping rooms, and Gilroy, who had been a farmer, cruised the rich lava-fed flat along the lake's rain-speckled shore.
Busy days and nights passed. They lost all track of time. No word came from New Crayton but they were so busy they paid no heed. The waterfall that fed the crater lake now turned a dynamo, and electricity worked its magic. At the two passes that permitted descent into the crater guards were now posted, armed with crude muskets and grenades, and the signal that was to mark the approach of the party from New Crayton was three spaced shots.
"They are coming at last," cried Irene. The third shot echoed soddenly through the thick air. She tugged at Masson's arm. "We must go to meet them."