"About the gold!" exclaimed one.
"Of course. What else was there to fight about?"
At this instant one of our men came running from a considerable distance, waving his arms excitedly, but unable to give voice to his story, in the inappreciable atmosphere of the asteroid, until he had come up and made telephonic connection with us.
"There are a lot of dead Martians over there," he said. "They've been cleaning one another out."
"That's it," said Mr. Edison. "I knew it when I saw the condition of those machines."
"Then this is not a wrecked expedition, directed against the earth?"
"Not at all."
"This must be the great gold mine of Mars," said the president of an Australian mining company, opening both his eyes and his mouth as he spoke.
"Yes, evidently that's it. Here's where they come to get their wealth."
"And this," I said, "must be their harvest time. You notice that this asteroid, being several million miles nearer to the sun than Mars is, must have an appreciably shorter period of revolution. When it is in conjunction with Mars, or nearly so, as it is at present, the distance between the two is not very great, whereas when it is in the opposite part of its orbit they are separated by an enormous gap in space and the sun is between them.