"What's this?" Bill cried in some excitement. "Looks like animals of some kind in a pen. They look like people, almost."
"What! Let me see!"
Brand rushed over from his telescope. Bill relinquished him the instrument. "See. Just above the center of the field. Right in the edge of that cultivated strip, by what looks like a big aluminum water-pipe."
"Yes. Yes, I see something. A big stockade. And it has things in it. But not men, I think. They are gray and hairy. But they seem to walk on two legs."
"Something like apes, maybe."
"I've got it," cried Brand. "They're domestic animals! The ruling Martians are parasites. They must have something to suck blood out of. They live on these creatures!"
"Probably so," Bill admitted. "Do you suppose they will keep people penned up that way, if they conquer the world?"
"Likely." He shuddered. "No good in thinking of it. We must be selecting the place to land."
He returned to his instrument.
"I've got it," he said presently. "A low mountain, in a big sweep of red desert. About sixty degrees north of the equator. Not a canal or a white dome in a hundred miles."