It was a low voice beside me; and suddenly I was aware of a hunched man's form sitting here on the floor. My gaze swung to see him--a slim young fellow in ragged Earth garments of tight black and white striped trousers and white blouse open at the throat. His face was good-looking; slack-jawed, weak face with pale blue eyes. His stubble of beard made his weak chin and thin cheeks bluish. He was smiling. "All right now, Ralston?" "Yes, I guess so." I could barely mouth it. My tongue was thick; all my body was a torture now from that prickling. But I could move, and every moment I could feel my strength coming back to me. "Where am I?" I mumbled. "What happened? Who are you?" And then I remembered Dora. "She--Dora Franklin--she was with me. Is she all right?" "Oh sure. If you could call being on this damned ship anything to be pleased about. The woman Setta is taking care of her. The damned little Physical hit her and you both with its shock, but you got much the worst. Dora's all right, now." I lay, with my strength coming back, listening in mute wonderment to the weird things he was telling me. His name was Johnny Blair. A year ago, in New York City, he had just been married. He and his young wife had been approached by that same weird man who had accosted Dora and me. They had yielded to his lure of a honeymoon paradise; had gone with him. The man's name was Bragg--an escaped Earth criminal, member of a band of fifty who in a wholesale jailbreak five years ago had gotten loose, stolen a space-vehicle and left Earth. Roaming in Space, they had landed on a little planetoid, a member of our Solar System, which encircles the Sun in an orbit outside the orbit of Earth; between the Earth and Mars. "We're almost there now," young Blair was saying. He had lowered his voice so that now he was furtive, fearing that what he was telling me might be overheard by someone outside our cubby. "Pretty weird new world we're headed for, Ralston," he commented grimly. He jerked his thumb toward the lens-shaped pressure window. "If you're strong enough to take a look, you'll see it right under us. We're dropping down into its stratosphere now." With his arm supporting me, weakly I staggered to the window. Blair was explaining that our tiny cubby was on the outer rim of the flat, disc-shaped vehicle. Its rocket-streams gave it a slow horizontal rotation, and its gravity plates, set now into repulsion, were slowly dropping it downward. Through the window I stared down. The little planetoid, some six hundred miles in diameter but with an immense density since it was almost solid metal, lay spread close beneath us. A weird world indeed; a great spread of convex surface of barren, tumbled rocks and mountains in great serrated tiers. The sunlight gleamed with a dazzling sheen on the burnished heights. Then we passed into the shadow of night. * * * * *