rched the starry vault. The Earth hung over us, flattened
beyond the full. The stars blazed to mingle with the Earthlight and
illumine these massive crags of the Archimedes walls. But no speck
appeared to tell us that the ship was up there.

We were on the curving side of the Archimedes wall which fronted the
Mare Imbrium to the north. The plains lay Like a great frozen sea,
congealed ripples shining in the light of the Earth, with dark patches
to mark the hollows. Somewhere down there--six or eight thousand feet
below us now--Miko's encampment lay concealed. We searched for lights
of it, but could see none.

Had Miko rejoined his party, left his camp and come here like
ourselves to climb Archimedes? Or was our assumption wholly wrong:
perhaps the brigand ship would not land near here at all!

Sweeping around from the Mare Imbrium, the plains were less smooth.
The little crater which concealed the Grantline camp was off in the
crater-scarred region beyond which the distant Apennines raised their
terraced walls. There was nothing to mark it from here.

"Gregg, do you see anything up there?" She added, "There seems to be a
blur."

Her sight, sharper than mine, had picked it out. The descending
brigand ship! A faintest, tiny blur against the stars, a few of them
occulted as though an invisible shadow were upon them. A growing
shadow, materializing into a blur--a blob, a shape faintly defined.
Then sharper until we were sure of what we saw. It was the brigand
ship. It was dropping slowly, silently down.

We crouched on the little ledge. A cave mouth was behind us. A gully
was beside us, a break in the ledge; and at our feet the sheer wall
dropped.

We had extinguished our lights. We crouched, silently gazing up into
the stars.

The ship, when we first distinguished it, was centered over
Archimedes. We thought for a while that it might descend into the
crater. But it did not; it came sailing forward.

I whispered into the audiphone, "It's coming over the crater."

Her hand pressed my arm in answer.

I recalled that when, from the _Planetara_, Miko had forced Snap to
signal this brigand band on Mars, Miko's only information as to the
whereabouts of the Grantline camp was that it lay between Archimedes
and the Apennines. The brigands now were following that information.

A tense interval passed. We could see the ship plainly above us now, a
gray-black shape among the stars up beyond the shaggy, towering crater