Strange and weird as it appeared, though, there seemed no sign of life on the broad plains and barren hills beneath us, and abruptly Sarto Sen headed the ship across the planet's face, speeding low over its surface while we scanned intently the panorama that unrolled beneath us. For minutes our straining scrutiny was unrewarded; and then, far ahead, a colossal shape loomed vaguely through the dusky crimson light, taking form, as we sped on toward it, as a tremendous, soaring tower. And involuntarily we gasped as our eyes took in the hugeness of its dimensions. It consisted of four slender black columns, each less than fifty feet in thickness, which rose from the ground at points a half-mile separated, four mighty pillars which slanted up into the crimson sunlight for fully ten thousand feet, meeting and merging at that distance above the ground and combining to support a circular platform, and on it we could see the shapes of what appeared to be machines, and other shapes that moved about them, though whether these last were human or not could not be distinguished from our height. And then, as my gaze fell toward the mighty tower's base, my cry brought the eyes of the others to follow my pointing finger. For gathered beneath and around the tower and extending away into the surrounding country were the massed buildings of a city. Low and flat-roofed and utterly strange in appearance were those buildings, and the narrow streets that pierced their huddled masses were all of the same smooth blackness as the tower itself-black, deep black, the roofs and streets and walls, laced with crimson parks and gardens that lay against their blackness like splashes of blood. And looming over all, its four tremendous columns rearing themselves above the streets and roofs and gardens like the limbs of a bestriding giant, the mighty tower soared into the crimson sunlight.
Sarto Sen flung an arm down toward the tower's platform, beneath us, and toward the shapes that moved on that platform. "Inhabited!" he cried. "You see? And that means that Alto's change in course was-"
He broke off; uttered a smothered cry. A spark of intense white light had suddenly broken into being on the platform beneath us, a beam of blinding light that stabbed straight up toward us, bathing the cruiser in its unearthly glow. And suddenly our ship was falling!
Sarto Sen sprang to the controls, wrenched around the power-lever. "That ray!" he cried. "It's attractive! — it's pulling us down!"
Our ship was vibrating now to the full force of its generators, but still we were falling, plunging headlong down toward the round platform beneath. I glimpsed Sarto Sen working frantically with the controls, and heard a hoarse cry from Hal Kur. There was a blinding glare of light all around us, now, and through the window I saw the platform below rushing up toward us with appalling speed. It was nearer, now… nearer… nearer… crash!
III
I think that in the minute after the crash no one in the conning-tower made a movement. The blinding ray outside had vanished at the moment of our crash, and we were now lying sprawled on the little room's floor, where the shock of the collision had thrown us. In a moment, though, I reached for a support and scrambled to my feet. As I did so there came shouts from the hull beneath us, and then a loud clang as one of the cruiser's lower doors swung open. I sprang to the window, just in time to see our six engineers pour out of the hull beneath me, emerging onto the platform on which our ship rested, and gazing about them with startled eyes.
I ripped open the little door in the conning-tower's side, to shout to them to come back, and even as I did so saw one of the men run back into the cruiser as though in fear. The others were staring fixedly across the broad platform, and in that moment, before I could voice the warning on my lips, their doom struck. There was a quick sigh of wind, and from across the platform there sprang toward them a tiny ball of rose-colored fire, a ball that touched one of the men and instantly expanded into a whirlwind of raging flame. A single moment it blazed there, then vanished. And where the five men had stood was-nothing.
Stunned, stupefied, my eyes traveled slowly across the surface of the great platform. Strange, huge machines stood close-grouped upon it, great shining structures utterly unfamiliar in appearance. At the center of this group of mechanisms stood the largest of them, a great tube of metal fully a hundred feet in length, which was mounted on a strong pedestal which pointed up into the sky like a great telescope. It was none of these things, though, that held my attention in that first horror-stricken moment of inspection. It was the dozen or more grotesque and terrible shapes which stood grouped at the platform's farther edge, returning my gaze.
They were globes, globes of pink, unhealthy-looking flesh more than a yard in diameter, each upheld by six slender, insect like legs, not more than twelve inches long, and each possessing two similar short, thin limbs which served them as arms and which projected at opposite points from their pink, globular bodies. And between those arms, set directly in the side of the round body itself, were the only features-two round black eyes of large size, browless and pupilless, and a circle of pale skin which beat quickly in and out with their breathing.