He stood upon a balcony high over the city, and looked out at a vast valley three miles in diameter, scooped out of the heart of the mountains as though by a cosmic cup. Overhead was no sky. A shell of transparent substance made a ceiling above the city, a tremendous dome that couched on the mountain peaks all around. Gray-green light filtered through it. An emerald twilight hazed the fantastic city, where twisted buildings like grottos of coral rose in strange patterns. It was a labyrinth. And it was--lovely beyond all imagination. "Those--things--built this?" Vanning breathed. "They knew beauty," Zeeth said. "They have certain senses we do not have. You will see...." From the exact center of the city a tower rose, smooth and shining as metal. It reached to the transparent dome and seemed to rise above it, into the clouds of Venus. "What's that?" Vanning asked, pointing. "Their temple?" Zeeth's voice held irony. "Not a temple--a trap. It is the tube through which they blast the spores of the North-Fever into the sky. Day and night without pause the virus is blown upward through that tube, far into the air, where it is carried all over the planet." The air was darkening, thickening. Here and there rainbow lights sprang into view. Elfin fires in an enchanted world, Vanning thought. Through the grotesque city equally grotesque figures moved, to be lost in the shadows. The monsters who ruled here--ruled like soulless devils rather than gods. "Come. We must hurry." Zeeth tugged at Vanning's arm. Together they went down the ramp into one of the winding avenues. It grew darker, and more lights came on. Once Vanning paused at sight of a corroded metal structure in the center of a well-lighted park. "Zeeth! That's a space-ship! A light life-boat--" The Venusian nodded. "And it is well guarded, too. It crashed through the dome a century ago, I was told. All the men in it were killed. A space-wreck, I suppose." Vanning was silent as they went on. He was visualizing what had happened in that distant past. A wreck in space, a few survivors taking to this life-boat and setting out, hopelessly, for the nearest world--believing, perhaps, that if they reached Venus, they would be saved. And then the tremendous atmospheric tides and whirlpools of the clouded planet, in which no aircraft but the hugest could survive.... Vanning whistled softly. Suppose he managed to get into that space-boat? Suppose there was still rocket-fuel in the tanks, and suppose it hadn't deteriorated? Couldn't he blast up through the dome to freedom? Sure--to freedom and death! No ship could survive in the Venusian atmosphere, certainly not this light space-tub, of an antiquated and obsolete design. * * * * *