"Strange," Brownell was muttering. He stared back the way they had come. Only a few yards behind them was the twilight zone! It was sharply defined, gray and misty, reaching sheerly up. Yet they stood in bluish daylight which extended ahead of them to the sharp, downward curve of the horizon.
Brownell walked slowly back to the twilight zone, gingerly testing the gravity. He entered the zone—and fell flat to the ground! Janus leaped to him, dragged him back.
"Did you ever see such a thing?" Brownell exclaimed as he rose. "Not only is there a sharp division of light and dark, but half the planet is terrifically heavy while the other half is normal. It defies all laws as we have known them."
Janus was peering intently into that grayness—toward the edge of the forest a hundred yards away. Suddenly he gripped the Professor's arm. His voice came a little hysterically.
"I wasn't dreaming, then. I see it! There it is—the thing that grabbed our ship! Don't move, you men, because I swear—it's watching us!"
Gradually they made it out, as they stared in the direction of Janus' gaze. It was a huge bulking shape that towered above the tallest trees. A roughly round, metallic body that rested on four jointed metal legs. Metal arms, too, dangled at its side.
"A robot!" came in a whisper from Dethman's lips. "A metal robot, but good Lord—look at the size of it!"
They were looking. Fifty feet above the ground they could make out its head, semi-spherical—and there were two eyes glowing with a greenish light, eyes that must have been large as dinner plates! It stood quite motionless in the gloom near the forest, watching them.
"That's the thing that towed us here?" Brownell whispered.
"Yes! I just got a bare glimpse of it."