Stumbling along between his captors, Haller found it hard to believe that this was not some mad dream. A magnetic asteroid, an Isle of Lost Spaceships, and humans who had degenerated into beasts. Covertly he studied their guards. Most of them were unnaturally squat, bow-legged, and were a startling example of how swiftly evolution can retrogress. Millenniums of progress, all the civilization so painfully acquired by man, had dropped from them. Faces crude and unintelligent, they spoke in hoarse gutturals, hardly intelligible. And even here, in the half-light of the plain, the uncanny green glow, like fox-fire, hung about their forms. Living ghosts, they seemed, walking through a twilight zone of death and desolation.
Over the rough terrain they led their captives, skirting crevasses, craters, leaping sure-footedly from rock to rock. And on all sides lay the battered hulks, looted of their food and cargoes by these strange beings, left to rust away or be buried by new rains of meteors. The barren melancholy of the scene pressed like leaden weights upon the captured earthmen.
At a mound of huge meteors rising above the plain, Orth, the herculean leader, turned. A narrow gap was visible between two great stones. Into this he plunged, his faintly glowing body giving wan light.
"Caves," Kindt muttered, glancing about. "Some job, too. Wonder why they didn't just live in the spaceships outside?"
Haller studied the passages. They had been made by removing loose fragments of the meteors, and were clumsily shored up by plates and girders from the wrecked ships. Enormous effort must have been required to drag the steel supports across the surface of this magnetized world, though perhaps by heating them it might have been possible. But why, when the ships offered luxurious accommodations, was it necessary to dig this rabbit-warren into the layer of meteors that covered the surface?
Downward they went, the bodies of their captors lighting up the rocky galleries. Now voices were audible ahead, the corridor was widening. Rounding a bend in the passage, Haller drew a sudden sharp breath.
Before them lay a vast cavern, crowded with bizarre figures. There were at least half a hundred of the bearded savage men, their skin giving off the greenish luminescence. Among them were four or five less uncouth looking individuals, wearing the uniform of Trans-Jovian. Some of the Cosmic's crew, apparently, had joined the renegades. What struck Haller, however, was the difference among the women. Some were ragged, dirty creatures, almost as neanderthal in appearance as the men, clutching ugly children to their breasts. But the other women huddled in the cavern brought harsh lines to Haller's face. Earthwomen, these, and of pure blood, some young, some approaching middle age, but all with horror stamped upon their features.
As Orth and his men swaggered into the cavern, an admiring throng ran to greet them.
"Another freighter caught in the field," he grunted. "More food aboard her! No shortage, now! And a new woman for one of us!" He motioned toward Fay, a wan, pale figure in the sickly glow that issued from her captors' fetid bodies.