reached its apogee, the farthest point of its orbit from the mother planet. It was “behind” the sun now, the dominant ball eclipsing the Earth. By now Mercury had grown hugely, a big pebbly world that literally shimmered with the frightening heat that poured down upon it. It was a startling sight, halved into hemispheres of darkness and extreme brilliance. The closer side was so hot that streams of molten tin and lead flowed, while that side away from the sun approached the arctic cold of absolute zero.

“I hope we don’t have to land there, Bart,” Steve spoke uncomfortably, looking out the port.

They began to feel the gravitational attraction of the miniature world, and they had to bolster rocket fire to combat it. Unlike Venus, Mercury could not be avoided in this flight.

Steve watched the gauges, especially the refrigerator dial. The latter was holding up well under this maximum barrage of heat from Sol, but there was still an oppressive hotness that reached through the laboring artificial coolness and penetrated Steve’s pores like insidious rays.

“If the Comet isn’t superior to Dennis’s in any other way, it’s made of better heat-resistant alloy,” Bart had said with self-assurance before leaving Earth. Steve wondered now if the proof of this assertion would be settled before both ships were beyond the sun’s reach.

Hours later, when the Condon Comet had passed Mercury, Steve was impelled to check on their rivals behind. For a moment he couldn’t find the ship on the TV screen. When he spotted it at last, by changing the direction of the movable screen, he was amazed to find the craft far below, hovering over the planet.

“Bart!” Steve called. “It looks as if Jim and Pete are in trouble! They’re diving for Mercury and seem to be heading for the terminator line between the dark half and the light!”

Steve wished there were some kind of radio communication between the ships, but electrical interference from the sun made radio impossible on these round-the-sun races.

“We’ve got to go down there, Bart,” Steve said.

“We haven’t won yet, Steve. There’s still the record to beat.”

“Will you stop thinking about records!” Steve retorted. “There are a couple of men down there in trouble!”

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