business man and a humanitarian. Both were frustrated.

Presently the motion of the copter changed. He knew the ship was descending. There were more violent swayings, as if from wind gusts deflected by something large and solid. Jorgenson even heard deep-bass rumblings like sea upon a rocky coast. Then there were movements near him, a rope went around his waist, a loading-bay opened and he found himself lifted and lowered through it.

He dangled in midair, a couple of hundred feet above an utterly barren island on which huge ocean swells beat. The downdraft from the copter made him sway wildly, and once it had him spinning dizzily. The horizon was empty. He was being lowered swiftly to the island. And his hands and feet were still securely tied.

Then he saw a figure on the island. It was a Thrid stripped of all clothing like Jorgenson and darkened by the sun. That figure came agilely toward where he was let down. It caught him. It checked his wild swingings, which could have broken bones. The rope slackened. The Thrid laid Jorgenson down.

He did not cast off the rope. He seemed to essay to climb it.

It was cut at the steam-copter and came tumbling down all over both of them. The Thrid waved his arms wildly and seemed to screech gibberish at the sky. There was an impact nearby, of something dropped. Jorgenson heard the throbbing sound of the copter as it lifted and swept away.

Then he felt the bounds about his arms and legs being removed. Then a Thrid voice—amazingly, a familiar Thrid voice—said:

"This is not good, Jorgenson. Who did you contradict?"

The Thrid was Ganti, of whom Jorgenson had once had hopes as a business man, and for whose disaster he had felt indignation as something else. He loosened the last of Jorgenson's bonds and helped him sit up.

Jorgenson glared around. The island was roughly one hundred feet by two. It was twisted, curdled yellow stone from one end to the other. There were stone hillocks and a miniature stony peak, and a narrow valley between two patches of higher rock. Huge seas boomed against the windward shore, throwing spray higher than the island's topmost point. There were some places where sand had gathered. There was one spot—perhaps a square yard of it—where sand had been made fertile by the droppings of flying things and where two or three starveling plants showed foliage of sorts. That 

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