Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/17

Rh busy, black thoughts came to devil him. Stubbornly he refused to realize it was all over with Brooke. He relived those young moments when they had first fallen in love. He had to smile, realizing that once he had thought it was Brooke's brilliant mind he loved. He knew enough of life today to know that when women were as beautiful as she, it was their loveliness men fell in love with, not their intellect. But Brooke Loring had both. And because she was able to think for herself, he told himself she must some day see how wrong the system was.

Then finally, the ship was sliding into the conical, black penumbra of Planetoid 88. The dead world leaped toward him. Opening up with a booming roar, the bow rockets bucked savagely against the vessel's forward drive. Dane's safety belt cut painfully into his stomach. Muscles strained as he levered himself back into the seat. His eyes searched the landscape ahead. Familiar in their gaunt barrenness, the grim snag-teeth of 88's sunless crags reached up to claw the bottom out of the ship. Gravity landed heavily on Dane's lap as he zoomed the craft out of danger.

The ship flattened off now, and the rockets' staccato explosions kept it motionless above the mountains. Dane twisted to look down, studying the frozen landscape. The planet was tiny; he could see the sharp down-curve of its horizon, scalloped with broken mountains of rock. Frowning, he searched for the crater of a mighty volcano, towering above all other landmarks. After a moment he located its familiar crag. The ship went into a long slope, as Dane pressed forward to stare.

The crater blancedbalanced [sic] on a tightrope between shadow and light. Sunlight streamed into it at an acute angle, casting weird shadows into the cone. Northward were the everlasting stretches of blazing desert; southward, the hills of granite and ice. Dane cut the fuel and sank beyond the crater's rim.

Rising swiftly all about, the craggy walls of the dead volcano seemed to tumble in upon the ship. Dane had that same feeling of repressed fear, of stark loneliness, that gripped him whenever he visited the caverns. The faint light exaggerated the hollows below his cheek-bones, deepened the cleft of his square chin. His two-day-old beard stood out like a smearing of grease paint over his jaws.

Then there was a thump against the floor. The cruiser had come to rest on the layer of glassite that roofed the caverns.

ANE came quickly to his feet. Donning helmet and space suit, he stepped out of the ship. Eighty-eight's incessant gales howled about him, making progress difficult. He leaned against the shrieking wind, skidding and stumbling over the glass until, at the pitted wall of the crater, he found the air-lock. His mailed hand released the catch-bar. He lunged into the shelter and re-closed the door. After opening the door to the caverns, he removed his suit and helmet and began a winding descent through the lava-rock tunnel.

At the door to the weird barracks, he paused, strange fears gnawing at his heart. The sepulchral quiet lay heavily upon him. The dry chill of the air brought goose-pimples to his flesh. Sternly, he clamped his jaws and turned the knob. The door flew open—and Dane froze. He had known what to expect, but even so the sight knocked the wind out of him.

Stretching away until its endless ranks were lost in blackness, a vast army of blue-clad warriors saluted him. Over each man was a glass shield like