"Yep," said Karns, "That's her, the doggonedest planet barrin' none in the whole dad-frazzled system. After you've been here you can tell 'em you've seen wind blow, and I mean blow. That's what them rakes is for. To get around you lie down on your belly and pull yourself along by them. It's a helluva place. The sun on your back'd fry you, 'cepting there's always a ice-cold hurricane cooling you off."

"How can that be, cap'n?"

"Convection's the ten-sol word for it. It's cause she's sizzling hot on one side and colder'n the underside of a iceberg on t'other. The wind goes straight up over the desert and comes straight down over the back side glaciers. Then it scoots for the desert again—and how! Nobody could live an hour in any part of the place if it warn't for the temp'rate strip, and that's cockeyed enough. You gotta steady, hundred-two-hundred-mile wind going straight into the sun, for that's right down to the horizon. In the lee of a house you burn up, in the shade of it you'd freeze solid in five minutes. And the houses have to be stone and streamlined."

Hank Karns kept a watchful eye on the terrain coming up to meet them. Mooring a ship in that wind required the utmost art.

"As I told you, itsa helluva place. Nuthing grows there but a sort of grass and some moss. The only animals is varmints, like the cangrela and the trocklebeck. It's cangrela claws and trocklebeck hides we trade for."

Billy Hatch listened, wide-eyed. This was romance.

"The trocklebeck is a critter something on the order of a armadillo, only it's got horns and big claws to hang onto the ground. It grazes, with its head allus into the wind. The cangrela is built along the lines of a crab and has claws, too. It crawls up behind the trocklebeck and kills 'em while they're feeding. Trocklebeck scales and cangrela claws are both harder'n hell. They use 'em in machinery."

"Oh," said Billy Hatch.

"But you better git forrard there and tend to them grapples, 'cause a-gitting hold of the ground here is ticklish business. Ef we miss it's just too bad. We'll roll over and over for miles and miles, like as not."

Hank Karns said no more for a time. As a matter of fact, he was far from ready to land. He had deliberately come up on the wrong side of the planet for making the landing at Sam Atkins' little trading store. He wanted to give it a general bird's-eye view. It 

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