at me with impish malevolence as he shambled past me and vanished around the other side deck.

In a few minutes more, with a blast of sirens, the little X-87 trembled, lifted nose first from its cradle and was away, slanting up into the night. The lights of the giant city dropped beneath us. I stood at one of the side bull's-eyes watching them as they dwindled into a blob, merged with other lights of other cities along the coast.

I had been up into the stratosphere many times, of course, but this was to be my first flight into Interplanetary Space. I could envisage our gleaming silver vessel now, tiny little cylinder with pointed ends, alumite keel-bottom and the great rounded glassite dome on top, as we slid so swiftly up out of the atmosphere. A little world now to ourselves.

The little vessel pounded and quivered with the vibrations of its disintegrating atomic rocket-streams at the stern. Then as we slid into the upper reaches of the stratosphere, the rocket engines were silenced; the gravity-plates were de-insulated, set with Earth-repulsion as we swung toward the gleaming half-moon ahead and over our bow.

The ship was vibrationless now. All movement seemed detached from us. Alone in Space we seemed hovering, poised.

The voyage of doom had begun.

"Apparently you have not suffered from the miserable pressure sickness," Ollog Torio said. "Or have you, Set Mokk?"

"I have not. We Martians are made of sterner stuff. Is that not so, Dr. Frye?"

"Well," the saturnine little surgeon said, "well, for you, yes, Set Mokk. But Martians are humans, like anybody else. I have seen them in distress, upon occasion, when the pressure changes too fast, coming out of the atmosphere."

Four of us were sitting on the triangle of the X-87's bow deck—the towering, swaggering Martian Set Mokk, slumped in his chair, wrapped in his great cloak with his hairy brown legs like huge pillars of strength crossed beneath it, revealed by its flair; the weazened, morose-looking Dr. Frye, and Ollog Torio. I had just met this Venusian. Like most of them from our sister planet, Torio was slender, graceful, with the characteristic finely chiseled features, grayish skin and heavy black brows. He seemed a man of perhaps forty. Romantic in dress and bearing. His hair was sleek and black, with gray streaks in it. His pointed face, accentuated by a pointed, waxed beard, was pallid. His robe was 

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