But that, too, was an error, born of my momentarily despairing thoughts. I was presently poised, some ten thousand feet up. The highest of the little peaks was no more than half that. They stood in a tumbled mass--jagged needle-spires--rocks and buttes and great round-top boulders, with ravines and gullies between them. Scene of utter, naked desolation, convulsed landscape, frozen into immobility. And suddenly my heart was pounding with abrupt exultation. Far down, where the starlight and Earthlight bathed a little peak, I saw the speck which was the descending Carson! Just for a second the tiny outline of his bloated suit was clear against the background of a shining rock. Then he dropped into an inky shadow and was gone again. I tried to mark the spot. A little triplet of spires, standing like sentinels above a small dark valley. Was that Andros, a landmark here? Probably it was. I was down in perhaps another half hour, with the triplet of spires standing up against what was now a sullen sky of broken leaden clouds through which the starlight and Earthlight fitfully shone. I had landed, by all that I could judge, about half an Earth-mile from where Carson had dropped. Had he seen me coming down above him? Perhaps. Perhaps not. With my helmet off, and with my lungs panting as they tried to adjust themselves to the weird air, I crouched for a moment in the shadow of a rock, peering, listening. There was nothing. It seemed a dead world, myself its only inhabitant--a silence so utter that my own breath, my pounding heart were roaring in my ears. I started in a moment, heading along a ridged, fantastic little terrain at the bottom of a shadowed valley. The deflated suit hung in baggy folds upon me; the bulky helmet was folded, hanging down from the back of my neck. Half a mile to where Carson had dropped. Gun in hand I advanced as cautiously as I could, until presently I was following a ragged ditch with the triple spires of Andros looming above me. Was this where Carson had landed? So far as I could judge, it seemed so. I was tense, alert with the vague, horrible feeling that I was walking into ambush. Then ahead of me, in a distant shadow, it seemed that there was a faint stir of movement. Soundlessly I melted down to the lead-gray rocks. I could not see the shadow now, but every instant I expected the luminous darkness to be stabbed with a bursting bolt. There was nothing. Suddenly the stillness was broken by a faint scraping sound. It seemed fairly close, and into the darkness from whence it had come I aimed my ray; pressed its lever. There was a faint, gasping scream; then a choked silence. I jumped to my feet, holding the paralyzer-gun leveled as it throbbed and quivered in my grip. Got him! He couldn't move. He was rooted there in the darkness, with rigid, stiffened muscles as the ray held him.