"Did you try to escape from the man who seized you in the Stadium?" I demanded. She understood me at once. She shook her head. "No. Mus' I confess it? I will, Peter. I heard that the controls were stolen--doom for my worl'--perhaps for yours." She stopped. I said: "So you gave yourself up? Is that it?" "No. Not jus' that. The man had me--but you ask me frankly if I try to escape. I said no." "You mean you're glad you're here?" "Yes," she said solemnly. "In what other way possibly could I help my Garla, or your earth?" "You think you can help them?" She shrugged. She was almost unbelievably calm, but I knew it was a pose. "Perhaps. If there is any way I can influence Graff--I am no fool, I will do my best--oh, Peter, not you would I have sacrificed! I did not know you were following--did not know you would be taken--" "But Zetta, darling--" "Peter--please!" She was building a wall up between us! "I am not pledge' to you yet, Peter--" I thought it best to drop the subject then. There were many other such small platforms escaping from Garla. They came presently, converging in upon us. We sailed high over the border--a thin, very tall latticed wall stretched over the country to mark it. Zetta pointed. "The border searchbeams are gone. Our guards all dead--it was what Kean feared. These platforms came into Garla unseen--taking back the Brauns and what they have stolen." The Infra-red control globes! They were on Graff's platform, undoubtedly. "See!" exclaimed Zetta. "There are the city lights!" Ahead, a great yellow radiance illumined the sky. The full moon was low to one side of us; to the other, the dawn was coming. Almost soundlessly we swept on. Over a sea of deep purple water, with a barren metal plain beyond it. The city came up into view. Tremendous metal buildings, set in terraces upon a barren metal rock surface. Fantastic structures, aerial like a giant hive. Spider-web bridges of gleaming metal; giant ladders; metal causeways swinging from cables at heights tremendous. All aerial, spiderlike, fantastically unreal. Glaring with blasts of yellow light; roaring with the noises of industry. We swept over it at a considerable height and dropped into a broad metallic pit in the plain beyond. A pit two hundred feet deep and several miles across. It was flooded with yellow radiance. Brauns crowded close around us; but I caught glimpses of a great activity. A thousand men at least were busy here. Platforms were landing, like ours from the direction of Garla. A large one was already here. Zetta and I were pushed to the ground. A dozen or more space-flying globes of various sizes--somewhat similar to the one Dan, Freddie and I had used coming from earth--stood about. At a distance one gigantic affair--a great terraced cylinder with banks of windows like a monster modern steamship--lay on a raised stone platform. Leaders led up to it from the pit-bottom. Our captors shoved us, though not ungently, in that direction.