I gazed, wordless. It was a fearsome, barren waste of blue-white metal rocks, fused and pitted as though the little world had been born in a fiery convulsion; a tumbled, strewn land of crags and boulders with ragged gashes of canyons in which now the shadows were black, impenetrable. And over it all there was a lurid green-red glow. It seemed inherent to the air; and it streamed up like a radioactive aura from the rocks of the ground. "The whole planetoid is like that?" I murmured. "Surely that's not habitable?" Johnny Blair rubbed his bluish stubble of beard. "Well, there's water--it rains sometimes. Maybe there's soil where things would grow, but I've never seen any. There's quite a colony of us humans here now. We've been stealing our food--" So that explained the raids on the Government Food Depots! A band of fifty escaped criminals, fugitives from Earth, originally had come here. Their leader was one Torkine; the pallid fellow Bragg was his lieutenant. And now, raiding Earth of food and supplies, married couples were being brought--and young men and young girls, to be married on the planetoid. A new world. "We've brought some young people from Mars also," Johnny Blair was explaining. "Been there three times, and once to Venus. Quite a lot of humans here now--four hundred maybe." To colonize an uninhabitable world. I said something like that and Johnny stared at me mutely. "It was inhabited," he said grimly. He seemed to shudder. "A world with just one inhabitant. It--it's a ghastly thing. It's got us all as its prisoners now. The Supreme One--that's what it calls itself. God, when you see it--" What weird horrible thing was this? I could only return his stare. A barren little planetoid, with just one inhabitant. Something not human. "But," I stammered, "when Bragg accosted us, there was a little headless thing in an overcoat standing near him. And we saw several of them coming out of the Food Depots." Johnny's smile was grim. "We call those the Physicals. They're parts of the Supreme One--like his arms and legs, only they're detached." "Part of him? His arms and legs? I don't get you." "No? Well, my God, you'll see." Johnny's gesture seemed trying to express his hopelessness at explaining. "You'll see him--the main central part of him, I mean, that never leaves his house. He's a Being, not all in one piece, like us humans. His housed main body can't move. You understand? He's rooted to the ground. The rest of him is detached and he works it by remote control. There must be thousands of those little Physicals--some in one shape, some in others. But mostly they're like the ones you saw."