breath. It was funny to hear reckless, daring Anna Charles talk like this now, while he, the cautious, careful planner, felt a wave of contrasting optimism. Maybe they'd both learned something from each other.

"Wait and see, Anna!" he yelled back. "You might be surprised again! Remember, I'm a machinist!" On his lips was a taunting smile of confidence.

Hours later, having circled Saturn, they dipped out of the Rings. But as the murk that had concealed them cleared, and the voidal stars showed bright again, they found a group of Callistan battle-craft not much more than a hundred miles away, their burnished hulls gleaming silvery in the faint sunshine.

"Ron!" Anna quavered, with a nervous catch in her voice. "We'll never make it, now! They'll surely destroy us!"

Young Leiccsen gripped the controls, and put on full speed. His face was grim, but that crooked smile was there again, tracing a line in his left cheek.

"That, Anna," he said, "remains to be seen."

Through her telescope, the girl continued to watch the enemy vessels, gleaming like silver arrows against the hard blackness of space. It was impossible that the keen-eyed lookouts aboard those warships did not see the black Earth-craft. And yet they approached no nearer. Their atom guns did not fire. The Barbarian was continuing on out toward Titan, quite unmolested.

Anna Charles' beautiful face was alight with puzzled wonder again. "Maybe I'm dumb, Ron," she murmured. "Just like I was last time. But I still don't understand why the Acharians neglect such a splendid chance to finish us."

Ron pointed toward a heavily glazed side-port in the control-turret. "Look out there," he suggested. "Back at our own hull."

Half rising from the pilot-seat, he was looking, too. They couldn't see much of their ship's flanks from the little window, but what they could see of its great, spreading guide-fins was plenty.

Those guide-fins had been deeply black, once. Now they were almost as bright and shiny as a polished mirror.

"When we were in the Rings," Ron explained, "all those fine meteors pounding against the Barbarian rubbed off every last speck of her black lacquer, and gave the metal underneath a swell polish, besides! I knew that it had to happen, of course. It was just a very ancient machinist's trick, with a 

 Prev. P 16/29 next