Orth, the semi-simian leader of these denizens of the asteroid, was waving toward the band which had taken the _Lodestar_. These returned across the rubbled plain shouting jubilantly, with their captives. Carlson, Seltzsky, and Wallace were pale phantoms, cringing under the blows that urged them forward. Joining forces, the two parties set out across the rocky surface, led by the giant Orth. Stumbling along between his captors, Haller found it hard to believe that this was not some mad dream. A magnetic asteroid, an Isle of Lost Spaceships, and humans who had degenerated into beasts. Covertly he studied their guards. Most of them were unnaturally squat, bow-legged, and were a startling example of how swiftly evolution can retrogress. Millenniums of progress, all the civilization so painfully acquired by man, had dropped from them. Faces crude and unintelligent, they spoke in hoarse gutturals, hardly intelligible. And even here, in the half-light of the plain, the uncanny green glow, like fox-fire, hung about their forms. Living ghosts, they seemed, walking through a twilight zone of death and desolation. Over the rough terrain they led their captives, skirting crevasses, craters, leaping sure-footedly from rock to rock. And on all sides lay the battered hulks, looted of their food and cargoes by these strange beings, left to rust away or be buried by new rains of meteors. The barren melancholy of the scene pressed like leaden weights upon the captured earthmen. At a mound of huge meteors rising above the plain, Orth, the herculean leader, turned. A narrow gap was visible between two great stones. Into this he plunged, his faintly glowing body giving wan light. "Caves," Kindt muttered, glancing about. "Some job, too. Wonder why they didn't just live in the spaceships outside?" Haller studied the passages. They had been made by removing loose fragments of the meteors, and were clumsily shored up by plates and girders from the wrecked ships. Enormous effort must have been required to drag the steel supports across the surface of this magnetized world, though perhaps by heating them it might have been possible. But why, when the ships offered luxurious accommodations, was it necessary to dig this rabbit-warren into the layer of meteors that covered the surface? Downward they went, the bodies of their captors lighting up the rocky galleries. Now voices were audible ahead, the corridor was widening. Rounding a bend in the passage, Haller drew a sudden sharp breath. * * * * *