become nervous quickly. John Koenig sat beside him 
on the copilot seat, while Doctor Helena Russell 
had taken a place in the passenger compartment to 
the rear of the cockpit. 
   The enormous north massif of the Curtius chain 
soon emerged in the field of vision of the Alphans. 
This massif belonged to the highest collection on 
the Moon. At a height of eight thousand meters, they 
rose up into the atmosphereless, dark sky of the 
Moon, stone towers of frightening extent. 
   The pilot throttled the speed of Eagle Three, let 
the powerful ship change into a slow gliding flight. 
The area, which radiated the bioplasmic field, was 
directly under the Alphans, somewhere down there between 
the jagged summits of the mountain massif. 
   Concentrating fully, the Commander kept the indicators, 
which supplied a sharp picture of the Moon's desert mountain 
landscape, in his eye. If a strange spaceship should have 
succeeded, in defiance of all expectations, to land unnoticed, 
then it had to now become slowly visible. But although the 
Eagle rode nearly motionlessly on the firery infernoes of 
its engines exactly over the bioplasmic field, there was 
nothing to discover except the cold lifeless Moon rock. No 
intact spaceship, no wreckage, no organism could be 
registered by the on-board cameras. 
   "Give's us nothing at all", murmured Mark Macinlock 
without understanding, "the sensors must be playing a 
trick on us." 
   That would have been an explanation. However it was 
not one in which John Koenig believed. 
   "Go even lower, Mark!" he instructed the pilot.
   Macinlock let the Eagle sink, towards a small plateau 
that looked like a cone that had been cut through the

8