The huge disc which was the spaceship dropped lower into the dark night of the weird little planetoid. For a brief time I sat at one of the control turret windows, staring down over the rim of the disc at the barren, tumbled surface. We were slowly sailing now hardly a thousand feet above it. Still there was nothing apparent down there save naked crags. But I knew we were nearing our destination. In the dim little corridors which spread out like spokes here from this hub of the disc, distant sounds of activity were audible. A dozen or more of Torkine's men were on board, watched and herded by a score of the little Physicals. This raid on Earth had produced quantities of food which the humans needed to sustain them on the planetoid. There was alcoholite also. I could see that many of Torkine's villainous-looking men were imbibing it. Their faces were flushed; some of them were murmuring to each other, with leering, appraising looks at Dora. And this raid had produced a few more Earth captives. Young men and girls who were confined in the little cubbies along one of the corridors. Their frightened voices were audible now as the Physicals herded them with preparations to disembark. "The planetoid world," Dora abruptly whispered. "Look--there is the city." Torkine momentarily had moved away, and Dora had shifted to sit beside me. Together we gazed down. The ragged mountainous horizon of the sharply convex surface of the little world seemed only a few miles away. And as the disc, dropping still lower, sailed forward, a human settlement came suddenly into view. I had only a brief glimpse of it. At first it was a group of light-dots. Then the colored glow from them disclosed little groups of dwellings. The lights came from their windows, and other glowing tubelights were set on poles in the spaces, like irregular streets between the houses. It was a weird, motley little settlement. Small, crude, single story dwellings, evidently erected from materials and parts of other houses filched from Earth on previous raids. A hundred little habitations, set in a group. * * * * * Torkine was beside Dora and me now. "Very nice, isn't it?" he said with his ironic smile. "That is for our Earth-people. With nothing here on this planetoid, we have had to do the best we could by bringing everything from Earth. And there to the left is the Martian village. And to the right, our Venus people live." The two other little house-groups stood a few hundred yards further away, with the weird night-shadows enveloping them. A score perhaps of strangely-fashioned habitations in each of them. A few dozen Martians, living here, captives of this monstrous Thing that ruled here. The spindly, fragile-looking Martian village was almost wholly dark. The Venus group was blue with flickering torchlight which disclosed little mound-shaped houses of wood and stone.