Torkine was beside Dora and me now. "Very nice, isn't it?" he said with his ironic smile. "That is for our Earth-people. With nothing here on this planetoid, we have had to do the best we could by bringing everything from Earth. And there to the left is the Martian village. And to the right, our Venus people live."
The two other little house-groups stood a few hundred yards further away, with the weird night-shadows enveloping them. A score perhaps of strangely-fashioned habitations in each of them. A few dozen Martians, living here, captives of this monstrous Thing that ruled here. The spindly, fragile-looking Martian village was almost wholly dark. The Venus group was blue with flickering torchlight which disclosed little mound-shaped houses of wood and stone.
"The nucleus of a new civilization," Torkine was saying. "The Supreme One is proud of it. Earth, Mars and Venus will be blended here in the new race we will produce. And the Great Master will rule and guide us. He chooses our mates. He directs our lives—he even thinks and acts for us, because, you see, we humans are very inferior."
The irony of Torkine's voice made me turn and stare at him. He was grinning at me. But in his dark, deep-set eyes there was something else that smoldered with the glinting reflection of his own thoughts.
"I see," I murmured.
"Well, you don't," he retorted. "But you soon will. There, to one side—that round thing is where the Supreme One houses himself. See it?"
Figures were visible down in the village now as men and women gathered in the doorways and in the spaces between the houses. They were all staring up at our arriving disc. And everywhere I could see the box-like little Physicals. Some stood like sentries at the street corners. Others were marching with their little precision steps back and forth. My gaze followed Torkine's gesture. To one side, partly between the Earth and the Martian sections of the weird village, a flat cauldron depression of the rocks seemed to have a big circular cover over it. It was a bulging dome-like roof perhaps a hundred feet in diameter.
The house of the Monster. The one thing which was native here. The dome-like roof, of some material which to me was nameless, indescribable, glowed with a weird violent sheen. Its circular outer rim was some ten feet above the ground—ten feet of entrance space. But the violet sheen down there was like a barrage-wall, with slits in it like doorways. Groups of Physicals were standing there on guard.
Our space-disc was settling to a level, rocky, open area just beyond the glow of the village lights. The Physicals here in the turret herded Dora and me away. Torkine, with one of the weird little shapes on each side of him, grimly, silently watching him, was at the bank of controls, landing us.