seless. The last of the food and water stores were taken. The weapons
in the chart room--the Benson curve lights, projectors and heat
rays--had vanished!

Other days passed. Earth reached the full and was waning. The fourteen
day Lunar night was in its last half. No rescue ship came from Earth.
We had ceased our efforts to signal, for we needed all our power to
maintain ourselves. The camp would be in a state of siege before long.
That was the best we could hope for. We had a few short-range weapons,
such as Bensons, heat-rays and projectors. A few hundred feet of
effective range was the most any of them could obtain. The
heat-rays--in giant form one of the most deadly weapons on Earth--were
only slowly efficacious on the airless Moon. Striking an intensely
cold surface, their warming radiations were slow to act. Even in a
blasting heat beam a man in his Erentz helmet-suit could withstand the
ray for several minutes.

We were, however, well equipped with explosives. Grantline had brought
a large supply for his mining operations, and much of it was still
unused. We had, also, an ample stock of oxygen fuses, and a variety of
oxygen light flares in small, fragile glass globes.

It was to use these explosives against the brigands that Snap and I
were working out our scheme with the gravity plates. The brigand ship
would come with giant projectors and some thirty men. If we could hold
out against them for a time, the fact that the _Planetara_ was missing
would bring us help from Earth.

Another day. A tenseness was upon all of us, despite the absorption of
our feverish activities. To conserve power, the camp was almost dark,
we lived in dim, chill rooms, with just a few weak spots of light
outside to mark the watchmen on their rounds. We did not use the
telescope, but there was scarcely an hour when one or the other of the
men was not sitting on a cross-piece up in the dome of the little
instrument room, casting a tense, searching gaze through his glasses
into the black, starry firmament. A ship might appear at any time
now--a rescue ship from Earth, or the brigands from Mars.

Anita and Venza through these days could aid us very little save by
their cheering words. They moved about the rooms, trying to inspire
us; so that all the men, when they might have been humanly sullen and
cursing their fate, were turned to grim activity, or grim laughter,
making a joke of the coming siege. The morale of the camp now was
perfect