Van Emmon’s fingers relaxed their grip.  He stirred to action, and turned briskly to Smith.

“Here!  Help me with this thing!”

Between them they got the remains of the cabinet, with its gruesome load, into the vestibule.  As for the doctor, he was bending over Jackson’s still unconscious form.  When he saw what the others were doing, he gave a great sigh of relief.

“Good!” He helped them close the door.  “Let’s get away from this damned place!”

The outer door was opened.  At the same time Smith started the machinery; and as the sky-car shot away from the ground he tilted it slightly, so that the contents of the vestibule was slid into space.  Down it fell like so much lead.

The doctor glanced through a nearby window, and his face brightened as he made out the distant gleam of another planet.  He watched the receding surface of Mercury with positive delight.

“Nice place to get away from,” he commented.  “And now, my friends, for Venus, and then—­home!”

But the other’s eyes were fixed upon a tiny sparkle in the dust outside the palace, where the vestibule had dropped its load.  It was the sun shining upon some broken bits of glass; the glass which, for untold ages, had enclosed the throne of the Death-lord.

Part IV

THE QUEEN OF LIFE

I

Next stop, Venus!

When he first got the idea of the sky-car, the doctor never stopped to consider whether he was the right man for such an excursion.  Personally, he hated travel.  He was merely a general practitioner, with a great fondness for astronomy; and the sole reason why he wanted to visit the planets was that he couldn’t see them well enough with his telescope.  So he dabbled a little in magnetism and so forth, and stumbled upon the principle of the cube.

But he had no mechanical ability, and was on the point of giving up the scheme when he met Smith.  He was instantly impressed by the engineer’s highly commonplace face; he had had considerable experience with human contrariness, and felt sure that Smith must be an absolute wonder, since he looked so very ordinary.

Kinney’s diagnosis proved correct.  Smith knew his business; the machinery was finished in a hurry and done right.  However, when it came to fitting the outfit into a suitable sky-car, Kinney was obliged to call in an architect.  That accounts for E. Williams Jackson.  At the same time, it occurred to the doctor that they would need a cook.  Mrs. Kinney had refused to have anything whatever to do with the trip, and so Kinney put an ad in the paper.  As luck would have it, Van Emmon, the geologist, who had learned how to cook when he first became a mountaineer, saw the ad and answered it in hope of adventure.

The doctor himself, besides his training in the mental and bodily frailities of human beings, had also an unusual command of the related sciences, such as biology.  Smith’s specialties have already been named; he could drive an airplane or a nail with equal ease.  Van Emmon, as a part of his profession, was a skilled “fossilologist,” and was well up in natural history.