checked beneath the canvas covering on one of the takeoff racks. There was grit there, which is a little unusual on a military vessel, with their one-track-mindedness about things being spic and span. And water running through canvas, taking along the dirt that even a military white-glove inspection can't find, leaves behind a residue of grit."

"It still doesn't seem enough," she said wistfully, as if begging me to prove my theory correct for her peace of mind. I was glad to oblige.

"There's more. Water weighs in at 62.4 pounds per cubic foot. So, fifteen hundred pounds of water would occupy approximately twenty four cubic feet; the exact surplus found aboard the Phobos II, in the bulkhead tubing."

Snow looked startled, but still unconvinced. "To kidnap fifteen boys, without Anders noting even the slightest sign of a struggle or disturbance...."

I nodded. "Right. It is odd, isn't it! This bothered me, too, until I checked the contents of those storage lockers."

"Oh. I'd forgotten about that!" she exclaimed. "What did you find?"

"Roughly, without going into precise itemization, there were bottles of space sickness capsules, clean handkerchiefs, toothbrushes, packets of soap and the like."

"And the like?" Snow remarked. "What likeness is there between those things?"

I smiled happily, and told her, simply, the clinker I'd spotted at once on seeing those items: "They're all items which small boys hate with almost apocalyptic fury. But I did not find such things as jackknives, candy, chewing gum--Shall I go on?"

"You mean that whoever kidnapped the boys took along the things which the boys wanted?" she asked, her lovely voice making an unbelieving squeak on the last word.

"I mean," I said softly, "that I believe the Space Scouts left the Phobos II of their own free will."

By evening of the following day we were in descent toward Marsport; a slow planet-circling downward spiral with a steady braking by the nose jets, lest we hit the atmosphere too fast and burn up. Even a thin atmosphere like that of Mars was no fun to enter at interplanetary speeds.

Snow, looking through the viewport beside her chair in the lounge, sighed gently and turned her lovely gaze back to my face. "I wish--" 

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