I got the motors started and worked the machine to an upright position. The crater floor was visible for half a mile about in all directions. It was a dead, desolate waste of hard sand and twisted black volcanic rocks. Further vision was cut off by the rosy mist that hung above the floor. Then I saw, far before me, a bright violet gleam through the crimson mist! Indistinctly I saw a broad green shaft of pulsing fire rise from it, to lose itself in the crimson sky! That intense violet light, from which the flickering reflections came, and from which the green beam reached up, I knew, must be the seat of the Lord of Flame! I started the engines once more, and the machine rolled mightily forward over the bare rocks, with a great clangor of metal upon stone, forging ahead at last to meet the alien menace. It roared over bare sandy flats, rounded great boulders, crashed into pits, crawled through craters! Then, suddenly, that terrible green flame flared out toward me! I knew that I had been discovered! Like a lance of green flame it flashed through the red gloom above! Its motion was alert, surprised, terrible! I set the loading mechanism of the little gun to fire high explosive, and put it in action, hurling shells in the direction of that violet light. And still I drove swiftly on. The flashes of the explosions were visible through the mist ahead, but the deep violet light still glowed. I turned on the reserve power units, and the machine vibrated from their throbbing drone. I threw another switch, and the deep purr of the giant transformers filled the ship. The mighty white tongue of the electric arc reached out ahead of me! And the Omnimobile plunged on! Two of the silver spheres--the ships of Mutron--appeared before me, with the green vortexes of the atomic disintegration springing up about them. The great arc brought them down in incandescent wreckage almost as soon as they came in view! The violet mist grew brighter, more distinct. I knew the shells were bursting near it, and that the arc would reach it soon. The faithful old machine lumbered rapidly on over the wild and twisted rocky desert--a waste as terrible as the mountains of the moon! In fact, that crater-pitted floor bore a curious resemblance to the typical lunar landscape, and the forces that produced them must have been similar. Then the mist cleared, and I saw the form of the thing that gave the violet light! It was scores of feet thick, and hundreds tall! It was a vast smooth cylinder of violet fire! It shone like metal, which was white hot and seen through violet glass! The color of it ran and flickered on the surface! Violet sheets and bands crawled and flashed upon it, and violet flame flowed away from it in many little tongues. The thing was perfectly smooth and cylindrical, five hundred feet in height--a Titanic "monolith" of metal!