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I instructed Mrs. H. to let Og. into the house. She stood aside and I had momentary pause about my decision. Having run across a superfluity of madmen in recent days, I saw at once that Og. was one of their number. His collar was exploded and his cravat tied carelessly. The skirts of his frock-coat bore singe-marks as if he had jumped through a bonfire. There was a peculiar burned smell about him. He had no eyebrows left and a serious case of the sun. It had been overcast lately and I doubted Og. was freshly-returned from some tropical adventure.

“Brandy,” he insisted. “Brandy, for God’s sake, Stent.”

Mrs. H. frowned, but I told her to send Polly to fetch a decanter of the third-best brandy. No sense in wasting the good stuff on an hysteric. I’ll need it to fight off this cold.

In my study, Og. saw the egg, still fit into the aperture of the new telescope.

“So you know what it is?” he exclaimed.

“Indeed.”

“A window — a portal — to the Red Planet. Have you seen the Martians?”

“Marsians,” I corrected.

“Their tripod machines? Their firing pit? Their heat-devices? Have you determined their purpose, Stent? Their hideous purpose?”

The fellow was ranting, but I expected as much.

“I have made notes of my findings,” I told him. “I will reveal my conclusions when I am ready to publish.”

“Publish!? Who will there be to type-set, print and bind your conclusions, Stent? Who to read them? Do you hope to amuse our new masters with your book? They don’t seem the types to be great readers, but I suppose you never know…”

Og. was laughing, now — bitterly, insanely, irritatingly. Polly arrived, and Og. snatched the decanter from her tray. He drew a mighty quaff, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Never the most savory of characters, he had apparently decided to become a wild Indian.

“There were four eggs,” he said. “As far as we can tell.”

“We? Of whom are you speaking?”

“The Red Planet League,” he said. “What there is left of it. When you took the final egg, we had this telescope delivered to you. I am loathe to admit it, but you are the greatest astronomical mind of the age…”

“True, true…”

“…and if anyone has a chance of cracking the egg’s secrets, it is you.”

“No doubt.”

I fancied I caught a slight smirk from Polly, and told her she could be about her business. She left.

“It must have been fate that brought you to Cave’s emporium. Cave is dead, by the way. The police report says “spontaneous combustion”, if you can credit it. There has been a rash of such phenomena. Almost an epidemic. Colonel Moran and I had a brush with the heat weapons, two nights back. We were separated afterwards. His nerve snapped. Terrible thing when a brave man’s nerve goes. He’s faced tigers and native rebels and charging elephants, but that flash from the copper tube boiled away all his heart. You saw Moran yesterday, I believe — before they caught up to him.”

“I saw no one yesterday.”

“In the Strand, outside Simpson’s. Moran would have seemed, ah, irrational. Lord knows, we all act like cuckoos. With what we have in our heads. It’s only to be expected. A big man, Moran. Red-complected, after our experience…”

I remembered. The madman who was taken away by the hump-backed policeman.

“Moran brought me into the League. He’s a big-game hunter and adventurer. He found the first of the eggs, in a temple in India. It was the eye of an idol worshipped by an obscene cult. When the light fell into the temple on certain days of the year, the portal opened and the cultists saw their “Gods”. You know what they really saw, Stent. The men of Mars. Those tentacles, those eyes, those mouth-parts! Another crystal was looted from the collection of the Emperor of China, carved into a goblet. I would not drink from that goblet for all the tea in its rightful owner’s dominions, would you? A third was found fresh, among the hot fragments of a new-fallen meteorite in the Arizona desert. All these came to the League, and all have been taken — taken back, one might say.”

Og. kept glancing