Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/117

Rh here? I can imagine only that the crew misjudged the time left them, and were either suffocated or eaten alive before they could reach the ship.

The word "suffocation" reminds me that I have discovered why so little oxygen remains in the air of this city. It is stored here in liquid form, to be used as power.

All the metal on the eastern hemisphere must have been required for the building of these two globes. What a stupendous task for a decadent race, that not only had to create from half-comprehended sketches the very tools with which they worked, but to incorporate the tools, once used, into the body of the ship to prevent wastage!

The alloy is unfamiliar to me, though I dare say it is principally carbon. Its extreme hardness leads to the supposition that in some fashion the meteorite which lay so many thousands of years in the Colla museum has been used. At least two elements in it do not exist on the moon.

The flier is well stocked with provisions. It would hold thirty men easily, yet it is maneuverable by one. Rocket blasts can be released from any point on its pitted surface.

"Twilight" is an outmoded word on the moon. Not enough air remains outside the deeper craters to prolong the last agonies of day; night falls pitchy black as soon as the sun disappears. This evening, however, Terra is gibbous, and reflects a light strong enough to see by.

Mingled with my desolation at the extinction of mankind—for I determined that no human life remains on Colla by cruising the eastern hemisphere before the sun set—are other emotions. Among them is a renewed awe at the bulk of earth. I have seen it hanging overhead a thousand times; but never till now have I given its opalescent surface more than a fleeting thought. What monstrous, inconceivable life forms exist beyond that shifting cloud-envelope? Will they be essentially similar to those the moon knew in some long-past period of her development, as scientists have long insisted? Or is life there developing in a manner which has no lunar parallel?

As I write these words, the ship is plunging with set controls to the west. I am returning at full speed to Womanland, hoping against hope that here, at least, human life may remain. My thoughts return irresistibly to Queen Ala, whose hand was so warm in mine as I bade her farewell.

Even if the women are dead, there is some hope that their nutrient solution and the unborn children immersed in it may remain undisturbed. It has been my observation that termites require some time to adjust their secretions for digestion or destruction of unfamiliar metals.

If only I knew something of planetary laws and motions! My space-traveling is sheer guess-work; I am headed for a spot in the heavens that may, or may not, intersect the orbit of young, steaming Terra. How fast is the ship moving? I have no idea. Undoubtedly it will arrive eventually—as a man-controlled globe if fuel and food hold out; as a blazing meteorite if they do not.

Before arriving at Alania I saw, sprawled among the termitariums, the clean-picked skeletons of a human