* * *

So dead with sleep that I could scarcely move, I managed to crane my
neck around to see better. There was no sky, only a faint gray haze
through which the stars shone. And yet the sun must be shining. I
stretched still further. There the sun burned, and around it was an
unmistakable corona. It was like airless space.

Was I dreaming again?

With a jerk, I got to my feet and climbed up the sloping floor to the
atmosphere tester. My fingers slipped off the stop-cock, then turned it.
And the air-pressure needle scarcely moved. It was true. Somehow, as the
scientists had always told us would be the case eventually, the air of
the moon, with so little gravity to hold it back, had evaporated into
space.

But in six months? It was unthinkable. Surely someone had survived the
catastrophe. Some people must have been able to keep themselves alive in
caves where the last of the atmosphere would linger. Kelvar _must_ be
still alive. I could find her and bring her to the _Comet_. We would go
to some other world.

Frantically, I pulled on my space-suit and clambered through the
air-lock. I ran, until the cumbersome suit slowed me down to a
staggering walk through the sand beside the Oceanus Procellarum.

Leaden and dull, the great sea lay undisturbed by the thin atmosphere
still remaining. It had shrunk by evaporation far away from its banks,
and where the water once had been there was a dark incrustation of
impurities. On the land side, all was a great white plain of glittering
alkali without a sign of vegetation. I went on toward Nardos the
Beautiful.

* * * * *

Even from afar off, I could see that it was desolate. Visible now that
the water had gone down, the pillars supporting it rose gaunt and
skeletal. Towers had fallen in, and the gleaming white was dimmed. It
was a city of the dead, under an Earth leprous-looking with black spots
where the clouds apparently had parted.

I came nearer to Nardos and the bridge, nearer to the spot where I had
last seen Kelvar. Below the old water level, the columns showed a
greenish stain, and half-way out the whole structure had fallen in a
great gap. I reached the land terminus of the span, still glorious and
almost beautiful in its ruins. Whole blocks of stone had fallen to the
sand, and the adamantine pillars were cracked and crumbling with the
erosion of ages.

Then I knew.

In our argument as to the possible speed of the _C