Ted gave slight heed to all these sights as he looked this way and that in the hope of seeing Maza an Ma Gong and her abductors. That they could not have traversed the length of the great hall in so short a time was obvious. They might, however, have been able to slip through the nearest breach in the wall before he reached the doorway. As he bounded forward to investigate this possibility, his path led him past one of the colossi. Without warning, a deadly green ray suddenly flashed from behind one of the gigantic limbs. As it struck the helmet of the young scientist he instinctively pointed and fired a pistol degravitor in the direction whence it had come. There was a flash of brilliant green light, a terrific pain in his head, and he crashed to the floor, the glass of his helmet tinkling on the hard tiles. Then came oblivion. How long he lay unconscious on the floor of the huge, subterranean building, Ted had no means of estimating. He awoke with a dull headache and the feeling that something was crushing him—bearing down on his body and limbs with terrific force. Raising his head to investigate, he cut his chin on the jagged remnant of his shattered glass visor before he was able to see what was lying across him—a number of pieces of what appeared to be broken plaster. After considerable effort he managed to work his arms free and unscrew the now useless collar of his helmet, with its menacing glass fragments. The air of the place, he noticed, was fairly cool and practically as dense as the atmosphere of the earth—a condition far different from that on the surface of the moon, where the atmosphere was extremely tenuous and the heat of the lunar mid-day far too great for the existence of unprotected men. It was good, he thought, to be able to breathe outside a glass helmet once more, even though the air was laden with unpleasant charnel odors. Five minutes of exhausting labor freed his body and lower limbs from the heavy fragments which pinned them to the floor. When he rose to survey the scene the cause of the fall of plaster was immediately apparent. His degravitator ray, fired in the direction from which the green ray, which had destroyed the top of his helmet, had come, had cut away the base of the supporting colossus behind which his assailant had been concealed, and this had crashed to the floor, carrying with it a considerable portion of the plastered ceiling which it had supported. Beside a leg of the image he saw the remains of a Lunite, partly destroyed by his degravitor ray—probably his attacker. Beneath the leg was the crushed, dead body of another Lunite, but of Maza an Ma Gong he saw no sign. Had she escaped, leaving him for dead beneath the heap of plaster? Or did her slender body lie crushed and bleeding under the fallen statue?