e same fabric, while
lead-cloth gauntlets covered his hands.

The lead-cloth costume was demanded by Dixon's work with radium
compounds. The result of that work lay before him on the bench--a
tiny lead capsule containing a pinhead lump of a substance which Dixon
believed would utterly dwarf earth's most powerful explosives in its
cataclysmic power.

So engrossed had Dixon been in the final stages of his work that for
the last seventy-two hours he had literally lived there in his
laboratory. It remained now only for him to step outside and test the
effect of the little contact grenade, and at the same time get a badly
needed taste of fresh air.

He set the safety catch on the little bomb and slipped it into his
pocket. As he started for the door he threw back his hood, revealing
the ruggedly good-looking face of a young man in the early thirties,
with lines of weariness now etched deeply into the clean-cut features.

* * * * *

The moment that Dixon entered the short winding tunnel that led to the
outer air he was vaguely aware that something was wrong. There was a
strange and intangibly sinister quality in the moonlight that streamed
dimly into the winding passage. Even the cool night air itself seemed
charged with a subtle aura of brooding evil.

Dixon reached the entrance and stepped out into the full radiance of
the moonlight. He stopped abruptly and stared around him in utter
amazement.

High in the eastern sky there rode the disc of a full moon, but it was
a moon weirdly different from any that Dixon had ever seen before.
This moon was a deep and baleful green; was glowing with a stark
malignant fire like that which lurks in the blazing heart of a giant
emerald! Bathed in the glow of the intense green rays, the desolate
mountain landscape shone with a new and eery beauty.

Dixon took a dazed step forward. His foot thudded softly into a small
feathered body there in the sparse grass, and he stooped to pick it
up. It was a crested quail, with every muscle as stonily rigid as
though the bird had been dead for hours. Yet Dixon, to his surprise,
felt the slow faint beat of a pulse still in the tiny body.

Then a dim group of unfamiliar objects down in the shadows of a small
gully in front of him caught Dixon's eye. Tucking the body of the
quail inside his tunic for later examination, he hurried down into the
gully. A moment later he was standing by what had been the night camp