born, because he had made himself, all in ten minutes, unfitted for everything.

"Zura may not be habitable," I said. "No food. Maybe you can't even breathe that air down there. We don't know."

"I don't care. I'm not going back to earth." And then he added, "I—I guess I'd rather be there even without food." He muttered it with a grim bitterness. "The only man in my world—I couldn't do anything wrong then, could I?"

For an hour after that I think we both sat almost in silence. I was busy with the electro-telescope, trying to see down into the swirling Zurian clouds. On the stool beside me, Alan Grant just sat brooding. And then suddenly, as though he had been struggling all this time to reach some momentous decision, he burst out:

"I've got to tell you, that's all. John, listen—"

I was absorbed with the telescope so that I hardly heeded him. It seemed that the clouds of Zura, in one place in the northern hemisphere, were breaking into a little rift. At Alan's words, I saw out of the tail of my eye that he had flung an apprehensive look at the little spiral staircase of alumite which wound down into the lower levels of the Planeteer.

"What?" I said idly.

He lowered his voice. "I can't help telling you. I don't want—again—"

What a fatuous fool I was at that moment! Queer how in life, things momentous may of actuality hang upon seeming trivialities! If only I had listened to Alan Grant then! But in that instant, as I peered into the eyepiece of the telescope, a rift in the clouds of Zura opened up. I must have muttered some exclamation.

"What is it?" Alan demanded.

"The clouds are breaking! We may be able to see the surface now. Wait, I'll swing it onto the image screen, so we can both see it."

I made the connections. The little flurescent screen glowed with an image of the atmosphere of Zura—turgid, green, yellow and black masses of clouds, whirled and tossed by giant storms.

"Good Lord!" Alan exclaimed. "Are we supposed to descend through that?"

"No. We'd have to have a rift. There's one coming there now."

Midway between the equator and the pole there was a widening opening. Then a segment of the dark surface was visible. I focused 

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