Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930

"Earth!" Norman was babbling. "It's Earth, Hackett--above us; my God, I can't believe even yet that we've done it!" "Then we're on--the satellite--the second satellite!--" Hackett fought for reality. "Those winds that caught us--" "They were the atmosphere of this world, of the second satellite! They caught us and carried us on inside this smaller world's atmosphere, Hackett. We're moving with it around Earth at terrific speed now!" "The second satellite, and we on it!" Hackett whispered, incredulously. "But these reeds--it can't all be like this--" They stepped together away from the plane. The effort sent each of them sailing upward in a great, slow leap, to float down more than a score of feet from the plane. But unheeding in their eagerness this strange effect of the satellite's lesser gravitational power, they moved on, each step a giant, clumsy leap. Four such steps took them out of the towering reeds onto clear ground. It was a gentle, grassy slope they were on, stretching away along a gray-green sea that extended out to the astoundingly near horizon on their right. To the left it rose into low hills covered with dense masses of green junglelike vegetation. Hackett and Norman, though, gazed neither at sea or hills for the moment, but at the half-score grotesque figures who had turned toward them as they emerged from the reeds. A sick sense of the unreal held them as they gazed, frozen with horror. For the great figures returning their gaze a few yards from them were--frog-men!