intending to bring the searchers closer and closer to the ship each day.

As the men began hiking over the glacier, Rob and Jim talked together through their helmet radio sets.

“I don’t understand how the water under the ice flows without freezing in this superlow temperature,” Jim remarked.

“It can’t be water,” Rob answered. “It’s something else, probably a liquefied gas with an extremely low freezing point. Wherever it is, it must contain all the elements needed to support its strange life forms.”

“Let’s start looking too, Jim,” Rob suggested.

The first “day” passed without success. Then the second. Night was only a relative term, for Uranus, Titania’s main source of light, was never out of the sky. On the third day, some of the men complained about having to spend ten hours at a time in biting cold weather searching for something they were sure did not even exist. Despite the men’s heavily insulated suits, the ultralow temperature that frosted the suits like mold could not be entirely kept out. Rob sympathized with the men, but there was no other way to do the job.

It was on the fifth day that one of the searchers spotted a small thick-bodied shape several feet beneath the ice. The cordon of searchers had closed in more than halfway to the ship by now.

“Jim, will you supervise operation of the ice saw?” Rob asked, when they had joined the men who had made the discovery.

Jim nodded and left.

“Has it moved yet?” Rob asked one of the crewmen, trying to curb the almost overpowering excitement he felt.

“No,” one of them replied. “It seems to be dead and embedded in the ice.”

Presently the ice saw came trundling up on its ski runners, being pushed along by Jim and two others. It was a boxlike machine, heavily insulated against the cold. Jim dropped the blade and turned on the machine, guiding it along an invisible outline around the imprisoned thing. He went over the cuts several times, lowering the blade each time until a depth of several feet was reached. Then he gave the saw a side-to-side motion, and there was a sharp crack as the block of ice was snapped off beneath the surface.

By now all the searchers had come over. Jim worked the lifters on the machine and the block of ice, containing its inanimate prisoner, 

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