t of explaining. Now for the gossip,
none of which is guaranteed. Roger is undoubtedly of Tellurian
parentage, and the story is that his father was a moon-pirate, his
mother a Greek adventuress. When the pirates were chased off the moon
they went to Ganymede, you know, and some of them were captured by the
Jovians. It seems that Roger was born at an instant of time sacred to
the adepts, so they took him on. He worked his way up through the
Forbidden Society as all adepts did, by various kinds of murder and job
lots of assorted deviltries, until he got clear to the top--the
seventy-seventh mystery...."

"The secret of eternal youth!" gasped Baxter, awed in spite of himself.

"Right, and he stayed Chief Devil, in spite of all the efforts of all
his ambitious sub-devils to kill him, until the turning-point of the
First Jovian War. He cut away then in a space-ship, and ever since then
he has been working--and working hard--on some stupendous plan of his
own that nobody else has ever got even an inkling of. That's the story.
True or not, it explains a lot of things that no other theory can touch.
And now I think you'd better shuffle along; enough of this is a great
plenty!"

Baxter went to his own cubby, and each man of the adept's cold-blooded
crew methodically took up his task. True to prediction, in fifteen days
a planet loomed beneath them and their vessel settled through a reeking
atmosphere toward a rocky and forbidding plain. Then for another day
they plunged along, a few thousand feet above the surface of that
strange world, while Roger with his analytical detectors sought the most
favorable location from which to wrest the materials necessary for his
program of construction.

It was a world of cold; its sun was distant, pale, and wan. It had
monstrous forms of vegetation, of which each branch and member writhed
and fought with a grotesque and horrible individual activity. Ever and
anon a struggling part broke from its parent plant and darted away in
independent existence; leaping upon and consuming or being consumed by a
fellow creature equally monstrous. This flora was of a uniform color--a
lurid, sickly yellow. In form some of it was fern-like, some
cactus-like, some vaguely tree-like; but it was all outrageous,
inherently repulsive to all Solarian senses. And no less hideous were
the animal-like forms of life, which slithered and slunk rapaciously
through that fantastic pseudo-vegetation. Snake-like, reptile-