a world as Mars. Rob and Duff, with some of the other crewmen in the pilots’ compartment, stared down upon trackless wastes of incredible frozen beauty. Ever since the ship had dropped low enough to reveal the dazzling surface features of the solar system’s most distant planet, no one had spoken. The bizarre landscape seemed to have awed everyone into a state of silent fascination.

Suddenly Duff broke the quiet. “Look, what a pretty blue lake!”

Rob saw the small body of water partly surrounded by a canyon of towering ice cliffs. In the twilight glow of stars and the weak sun, the lake and peaks sparkled with a clarity that reminded Rob of great jewels.

“It’s a lake rightly enough,” Spacemaster O’Leary said. “You can see the ripples, but that’s no water.” He checked the thermocouple. “It’s 348 degrees below zero Fahrenheit down there! That’s a lake of liquid oxygen. I’ve seen them on the dark side of Mercury.”

Rob gasped in astonishment. He had visited most of the planets, but there was nothing to compare with a wonder such as this.

Lieutenant Stone then spoke. “Those ice cliffs don’t look to be frozen water. Do you think they might be chunks of dry ice, sir?”

“That’s my opinion,” the spacemaster replied, “—solid carbon dioxide. Notice those other crystal peaks off to the right. They are probably ammonia. I’ve seen them on Mercury, too.”

There was a scant, dense atmosphere close to the ground—that had been known. It was a strange-looking substance, Rob thought. It lay like a blanket of gray-blue mist between the space ship, which was several thousands of feet up, and the ground below. The compressed atmosphere was filled with small clouds of icelike particles which floated lazily near the surface like tiny fish in a cosmic ocean. Everything about the scene suggested a terrible coldness almost beyond human realization.

“Our bearings indicate this is approximately the area where the Capella was last heard from,” the skipper declared. “But I see nothing of the ship. Do any of you?”

With the others, Rob strained his eyes to pick out a shiny cigar shape in the bleak stretches below. It seemed an impossible task, and he was reminded of an old analogy of the elusive needle in the haystack. There were broad areas of dark rock between the icebergs, filmed over lightly with rime. Such dark expanses could account for Pluto’s weak 

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