He was led another long distance.  Then claws or hands lifted him.  Metal clanked.  Those who held him dropped him.  He fell three or four feet onto soft sand.  There was a clanging of metal above his head.

Then a human voice said sardonically, “Welcome to our city!  Where’d they catch you?”

Lockley said, “Up on a mountainside, trying to see what they were doing.  Will you get me loose, please?”

Hands worked on the cord that bound his arms close to his body.  They loosened.  He removed the blindfold.

He was in a metal-walled and metal-ceilinged vault, perhaps eight feet wide and the same in height, and perhaps twelve feet long.  It had a floor of sand.  Some small amount of light came in through the circular hole he’d been dropped through, despite a cover on it.  There were three men already in confinement here.  They wore clothing appropriate to workmen from the construction camp.  There was a tall lean man, and a broad man with a moustache, and a chunky man.  The chunky man had spoken.

“Did you see any of ’em?” he demanded now.

Lockley shook his head.  The three looked at each other and nodded.  Lockley saw that they hadn’t been imprisoned long.  The sand floor was marked but not wholly formed into footprints, as it would have been had they moved restlessly about.  Mostly, it appeared, they’d simply sat on the sand floor.

“We didn’t see ’em either,” said the chunky man.  “There was a hell of a explosion over at the lake this mornin’.  We piled in a car—­my car—­and came over to see what’d happened.  Then something hit us.  All of us.  Lights.  Noise.  A godawful stink.  A feeling all over like an electric shock that paralyzed us.  We came to blindfolded and tied.  They brought us here.  That’s our story so far.  What’s happened to you—­and what really happened to us?”

“I’m not sure,” said Lockley.

He hesitated.  Then he told them about Vale, and what he’d reported.  They’d had no explanation at all of what had happened to them.  They seemed relieved to be informed, though the information was hardly heartening.

“Critters from Mars, eh?” said the moustached man.  “I guess we’d act the same way if we was to get to Mars.  They got to figure out some way to talk to who lives here.  I guess that makes us it—­unless we can figure out something better.”

Lockley, by temperament, tended to anticipate worse things in the future than had come in the past.  The suggestion that the occupants of the spaceship had captured men to learn how to communicate with them seemed highly optimistic.  He realized that he didn’t believe it.  It seemed extremely unlikely that the invaders from space were entirely ignorant of humanity.  The choice of Boulder Lake as a landing place, for example, could not have been made from space.  If there was need for deep water to land in—­which seemed highly probable—­then it would have been simple good sense to descend in