n,
yet curiously, strangely, different. They were tall of stature, narrow
across the shoulders, muscular in a lean, attenuated fashion. But
their faces! McGuire found his eyes returning in horrified fascination
to each hideous, inhuman countenance.

A colorless color, like the dead gray of ashes; a skin like that of an
African savage from which all but the last vestige of color had been
drained. It was transparent, parchment-like, and even in the light of
the room that glowed from some hidden source, he could see the
throbbing lines of blood-vessels that showed livid through the
translucent skin. And he remembered, now, the fingers, half-seen in
his moments of awakening--they were like clinging tendrils, colorless,
too, in that ashy gray, and showed the network of veins as if each
hand had been flayed alive.

* * * * *

The observer found himself analyzing, comparing, trying to find some
earthly analogy for these unearthly creatures. Why did he think of
potatoes sprouting in a cellar? What possible connection had these
half-human things with that boyhood recollection? And he had seen some
laboratory experiments with plants and animals that had been cut off
from the sunlight--and now the connection was clear; he knew what this
idea was that was trying to form.

These were creatures of the dark. These bleached, drained faces showed
skin that had never known the actinic rays of the sun; their whole
framework proclaimed the process that had been going on through
countless generations. Here was a race that had lived, if not in
absolute darkness, then in some place where sunlight never shone--a
place of half-light--or of clouds.

"Clouds!" The exclamation was startled from him. And: "Clouds!" he
repeated meditatively; he was seeing again a cloud-wrapped world in
the eye-piece of a big refracting telescope. "Blanketed in clouds,"
Professor Sykes had said. The scientist himself was speaking to him
now in bewildered tones.

"Clouds?" he inquired. "That's a strange remark to make. Where are we,
Lieutenant McGuire? I remember nothing after you fired. Are we
flying--in the clouds?"

"A long, long way beyond them, is my guess," said McGuire grimly. It
was staggering what all this might mean; there was time needed for
fuller comprehension. But the lean bronzed face of the flyer flushed
with animation, and in spite of the terrors that must surely lie ahead
he felt strangely elated at the actual