directly on such a holocaust, at a range of a mere thousand miles, and not be burned from their sockets.

Bert and Alice noticed that the Space Patrol craft were no longer pursuing them. Alice switched on the radio again but only jangled sounds came through.

"Now for the last half of our job, Allie," Bert said. "First we attach shoulder-pack jets to our spacesuits."

This was accomplished a few seconds before the stupendous flash of the Big Pill's explosion blazed beyond the horizon. The dark curve of Titan's bulk was limned against thin white fire that streamed outward toward the stars like comet's hair. The spectacle looked like a much-enlarged color-photo of a segment of a solar eclipse. The glare on the other side of Titan was so intense and far-reaching that the night-portions of huge Saturn and his other satellites, and the shadowed part of the fabulous, treasure-filled Rings, all hundreds of thousands of miles away, registered an easily perceptible flicker. But in airless space, of course, no sound was transmitted.

Alice's face went pale. Bert did not stop doing what must be done—adjusting the timing system in the black case beside his pilot seat, and looking with a final, intense glance along the cable which led back through the hull of the ship to a silvery, pipelike thing around which the thousands of tons of sinister black ingots were stacked. It was the primer-cap of another kind of subatomic fury.

About the white fire beyond the horizon, hardly dimming at all after its first dazzling flash, neither Alice nor Bert said anything. Maybe their awe and concern were too great. But already long fingers of incandescent gases were jetting and flowing over the hilltops, as if to catch up with the speeding ship.

Bert Kraskow knew pretty well what was going on where the Big Pill had struck the crust of Titan. First, there had been that stupendous blast. Then, inconceivable blue-white incandescence, like the heart of a star, began gnawing more gradually into the walls of the gigantic crater that had been formed. A chain-reacting process was now spreading through the silicates and other components of Titan's crust. It was a blunt and terrible inferno.

But to the scientist's view, chemical compounds were being broken apart; atoms were being shattered, and recast in new forms, as floods of neutrons, and other basic particles raced like bullets through their structure. On a small scale, here was something that was like the 

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