He went through the ship, bellowing, and faced mutinous snarlings. But when the Warlock was around on that side of the planet again, the members of the crew saw the strange appearance, too. They examined it with telescopes. They grew hysterically happy. They went frantically to work to clear away the signs of a month and a half of mutiny and despair.

It took them three days to get the ship to tidiness again, and during all that time the peculiar tawny jet remained. On the sixth day the jet was fainter. On the seventh it was [41] larger than before. It continued larger. And telescopes at highest magnification verified what the emergency communication had said.

[41]

Then the crew began to experience frantic impatience. It was worse, waiting those last three or four days, than even all the hopeless time before. But there was no reason to hate anybody, now. The skipper was very much relieved.

There was eighteen hundred feet of steel grid overhead. It made a crisscross, ring-shaped wall more than a quarter-mile high and almost to the top of the surrounding mountains. But the valley was not exactly a normal one. It was a crater, now: a steeply sloping, conical pit whose walls descended smoothly to the outer girders of the red-painted, glistening steel structure. More girders for the completion of the grid projected from the sand just outside its half-mile circle. And in the landing grid there was now a smaller, elaborate, truss-braced object. It rested on the rocky ground, and it was not painted, and it was quite small. A hundred feet high, perhaps, and no more than three hundred across. But it was visibly a miniature of the great, now-uncovered, re-painted landing grid which was qualified to handle interstellar cargo ships and all the proper space-traffic of a minerals-colony planet.

A caterwheel truck came lurching and rolling and rumbling down the side of the pit. It had a sunshade and ground-reflector wings, and Bordman rode tiredly on a hobbyhorse saddle in its back cargo section. He wore a heat-suit.

The truck reached the pit’s bottom. There was a tool shed there. The caterwheel-truck bumped up to it and stopped. Bordman got out, visibly cramped by the jolting, rocking, exhausting-to-unaccustomed-muscles ride.

“Do you want to go in the shed and cool off?” asked Chuka brightly.

“I’m all right,” said Bordman curtly. “I’m quite comfortable, so long as you feed me 

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