life was to go on this expedition with me, and he made me promise to bury him at the site of our new colony. The pact was between him and me, and I've followed it to the letter, telling no one."

Mason's lips curled in a sneer. "And just what makes you think we're going to believe that story?" he demanded.

Norris lit a cigar. "It's entirely immaterial to me whether you believe it or not."

But the story was believed, especially by the women, to whom the romantic angle appealed and Mason's embryonic mutiny died without being born, and the Marie Galante sailed on through uncharted space toward her ninth and last landing.

As the days dragged by and no word came from the bridge cuddy, restlessness began to grow amongst us. Rumor succeeded rumor, each story wilder and more incredible than the rest. Then just as the tension had mounted to fever pitch, there came the sickening lurch and grinding vibration of another landing.

Norris dispensed with his usual talk before marching out from the ship. After testing the atmosphere with the ozonometer, he passed out the heat pistols and distributed the various instruments for computing radioactivity and cosmic radiation.

"This is the planet Nizar," he said shortly. "Largest in the field of the sun Ponthis. You will make your survey as one group this time. I will remain here."

He stood watching us as we marched off down the cliff side. Then the blue hensorr trees rose up to swallow him from view. Mason swung along at the head of our column, eyes bright, a figure of aggressive action. We had gone but a hundred yards when it became apparent that, as a planet, Nizar was entirely different from its predecessors. There was considerable top soil, and here grew a tall reed-shaped plant that gave off varying chords of sound when the wind blew.

It was as if we were progressing through the nave of a mighty church with a muted organ in the distance. There was animal life too, a strange lizard-like bird that rose up in flocks ahead of us and flew screaming overhead.

"I don't exactly like it, Bagley," he said. "There's something unwholesome about this planet. The evolution is obviously in an early state of development, but I get the impression that it has gone backward; that the planet is really old and has reverted to its earlier life."

Above us the sky was heavily overcast, and a tenuous white mist rising up from the hensorr trees formed curious shapes and designs. In the distance I could hear the swashing of waves on a beach.

Suddenly Mason stopped. "Look!" he said.

Below us stretched the shore of a great sea. But it was the structure rising up from that shore that drew a sharp exclamation from me. Shaped in a rough ellipse, yet mounted high toward a common point, was a large building of multiple hues and colors. The upper portion was eroded to crumbling ruins, the lower part studded with many bas-reliefs and triangular doorways.

"Let's go," Mason said, breaking out into a fast loping run.

The building was farther away than we had thought, but when we finally came up to it, we saw that it was even more of a ruin than it had at first appeared. It was only a shell with but two walls standing, alone and forlorn. Whatever race had lived here, they had come and gone.

We prowled about the ruins for more than an hour. The carvings on the walls were in the form of geometric designs and cabalistic symbols, giving no clue to the city's former occupants' identity.

And then Mason found the stairs leading to the lower crypts. He switched on his ato-flash and led the way down cautiously. Level one ... level two ... three ... we descended lower and lower. Here water from the nearby sea oozed in little rivulets that glittered in the light of the flash.

We emerged at length on a wide underground plaisance, a kind of amphitheater, with tier on tier of seats surrounding it and extending back into the shadows.

"Judging from what we've seen," Mason said, "I would say that