I GAZED, WORDLESS. It was a fearsome, barren waste of blue-white metal rocks, fused and pitted as though the little world had been born in a fiery convulsion; a tumbled, strewn land of crags and boulders with ragged gashes of canyons in which now the shadows were black, impenetrable. And over it all there was a lurid green-red glow. It seemed inherent to the air; and it streamed up like a radioactive aura from the rocks of the ground.
“The whole planetoid is like that?” I murmured. “Surely that’s not habitable?”
Johnny Blair rubbed his bluish stubble of beard. “Well, there’s water—it rains sometimes. Maybe there’s soil where things would grow, but I’ve never seen any. There’s quite a colony of us humans here now. We’ve been stealing our food—”
So that explained the raids on the Governme
