Astounding Stories, May, 1931

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                              ASTOUNDING

                               STORIES

                                 20c


              _On Sale the First Thursday of Each Month_


                       W. M. CLAYTON, Publisher
                         HARRY BATES, Editor
                  DOUGLAS M. DOLD, Consulting Editor


The Clayton Standard on a Magazine Guarantees

    _That_ the stories therein are clean, interesting, vivid, by leading
           writers of the day and purchased under conditions approved by
           the Authors' League of America;

    _That_ such magazines are manufactured in Union shops by American
           workmen;

    _That_ each newsdealer and agent is insured a fair profit;

    _That_ an intelligent censorship guards their advertising pages.


_The other Clayton magazines are:_

ACE-HIGH MAGAZINE, RANCH ROMANCES, COWBOY STORIES, CLUES, FIVE-NOVELS
MONTHLY, ALL STAR DETECTIVE STORIES, RANGELAND LOVE STORY MAGAZINE,
WESTERN ADVENTURES, and WESTERN LOVE STORIES.

_More than Two Million Copies Required to Supply the Monthly Demand
for Clayton Magazines._

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VOL. VI, No. 2            CONTENTS            MAY, 1931


COVER DESIGN                  H. W. WESSO

    _Painted in  Water-Colors from a Scene in "Dark Moon._"


DARK MOON                     CHARLES W. DIFFIN        148

    _Mysterious, Dark, Out of the Unknown Deep Comes a New Satellite to
     Lure Three Courageous Earthlings on to Strange Adventure._
     (_A Complete Novelette._)


WHEN CAVERNS YAWNED           CAPTAIN S. P. MEEK       198

    _Only Dr. Bird's Super-Scientific Sleuthing Stands in the Way of
     Ivan Sarnoff's Latest Attempt at Wholesale Destruction._


THE EXILE OF TIME             RAY CUMMINGS             216

    _Young Lovers of Three Eras Are Swept down the Torrent of the Sinister
     Cripple Tugh's Frightful Vengeance._ (Part Two of a Four-Part Novel.)


WHEN THE MOON TURNED GREEN    HAL K. WELLS             241

    _Outside His Laboratory Bruce Dixon Finds a World of Living Dead
     Men--and Above, in the Sky, Shines a Weird Green Moon._


THE DEATH-CLOUD               NAT SCHACHNER AND
                              ARTHUR L. ZAGAT          256

    _The Epic Exploit of One Who Worked in the Dark and Alone, Behind
     the Enemy Lines, in the Great Last War._


THE READERS' CORNER           ALL OF US                276

    _A Meeting Place for Readers of Astounding Stories._


Single Copies, 20 Cents (In Canada, 25 Cents) Yearly Subscription,
$2.00

Issued monthly by Readers' Guild, Inc., 80 Lafayette Street, New York,
N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as
second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York,
N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in
the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group. For advertising rates
address The Newsstand Group, Inc., 80 Lafayette St., New York or The
Wrigley Bldg., Chicago.

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Dark Moon

A COMPLETE NOVELETTE

_By Charles W. Diffin_

CHAPTER I

_There Comes a New World_

[Illustration: _Behind them a red ship was falling--falling free!_]

[Sidenote: Mysterious, dark, out of the unknown deep comes a new
satellite to lure three courageous Earthlings on to strange
adventures.]


The one hundred and fifty-ninth floor of the great Transportation
Building allowed one standing at a window to look down upon the roofs
of the countless buildings that were New York.

Flat-decked, all of them; busy places of hangars and machine shops and
strange aircraft, large and small, that rose vertically under the lift
of flashing helicopters.

The air was alive and vibrant with directed streams of stubby-winged
shapes that drove swiftly on their way, with only a wisp of vapor from
their funnel-shaped sterns to mark the continuous explosion that
propelled them. Here and there were those that entered a shaft of
pale-blue light that somehow outshone the sun. It marked an ascending
area, and there ships canted swiftly, swung their blunt noses upward,
and vanished, to the upper levels.

A mile and more away, in a great shaft of green light from which all
other craft kept clear, a tremendous shape was dropping. Her hull of
silver was striped with a broad red band; her multiple helicopters
were dazzling flashes in the sunlight. The countless dots that were
portholes and the larger observation ports must have held numberless
eager faces, for the Oriental Express served a cosmopolitan passenger
list.

But Walter Harkness, standing at the window, stared out from troubled,
frowning eyes that saw nothing of the kaleidoscopic scene. His back
was turned to the group of people in the room, and he had no thought
of wonders that were prosaic, nor of passengers, eager or blase; his
thoughts were only of freight and of the acres of flat roofs far in
the distance where alternate flashes of color marked the descending
area for fast freighters of the air.