“The eldest son of P’an-ku, who became P’an-ku at the death of his father, had been commander in chief of our interplanetary war fleets, and had been taken prisoner by the ruler of Lu Gong. He had left a wife with child, and she fled with the few hundreds who were the progenitors of our present race into the great caverns of our world. There a male child was born to her, and as he was the eldest son of that P’an-ku who never came back to us, he was the hereditary ruler of my people, and his descendants have directed their destinies ever since. “Nearly a thousand years after the great war, our ancestors, who had multiplied in numbers and increased in knowledge, were able to construct suits in which they could explore the surface of our world, breathing air which was concentrated in tanks they carried with them. While searching the ruins of the ancient capital of P’an-ku, they came upon a metal cylinder which contained a message left there by his eldest son a thousand years before. It stated that he had escaped from Lu Gong, as there were none left alive there to detain him, and had come to Ma Gong in his one man space flyer, only to find his world destitute of people and untenable because of its lack of atmosphere. “He stated that he was leaving for Du Gong—that world inhabited, in those days, by strange monsters and savage peoples, and that he would never have deserted Ma Gong had he found but a single one of his subjects alive, but that he could no longer stay in a dead world when there was a chance that he might find life and an empire in a live one. In closing, he implored the Great Lord Sun to pardon him for† this desire to live and, if possible, perpetuate his race and his imperial line.” “But what of the white race which now inhabits Ma Gong?” asked the professor. “Whence did they come?” “About twelve hundred years after the great war,” said Kwan Tsu Khan, “a party of our ancestors who were exploring the surface of our world, met a party of white people, descendants of the Lu Gong colonists they afterward learned, who had fled to the inner caverns during the great war. They, too, had invented heat proof, cold proof suits and concentrated air tanks which enabled them to travel on the crust of our world. A parley was started, but because of the great hatred between the two races, a quarrel quickly became a battle, and only a few of the explorers from either side returned to tell their stories to their respective countrymen.