heat-racked bank steps. There was still a flicker of life in his faded blue eyes, glazed with agony. But he was past all help.

"Ron," he muttered, as the youth bent over him. "You didn't believe me—anyhow at first.... But I ain't a liar.... I told the truth.... Mars.... That ship there.... Do what I said—please.... It'll lick the Callistans.... You got nerve—cleverness—plenty. A swell space-pilot, too—the others aren't so good.... Bring the freighter to Titan.... Sprinkle the stuff in the hold all over Leiccsenland.... The cargo is—is...."

And there old Arne's heart stopped beating. His charred body relaxed in its last sleep. His brain ceased to think. And a vast question-mark seemed to hang over him. While in Leiccsenland, chaos thundered. Fire crackled and roared.

Anna Charles was bending close to the old man's body, too, her face a mask of dumb horror. But she had become challenging again, now. "You heard what he said, didn't you, Ron Leiccsen?" she flung at him with a taut, cold softness. "Your idea that we should all leave Titan may be wrong! There's that ship on Mars, which might save our colony! And he—Arne—appointed you to go and bring it here!"

No one could ever have traced the course of the tumultuous hatred and doubt that seethed in Ron Leiccsen's mind just then. Red hate of the laughing fiends of Callisto! Little, withered Arne Reynaud—murdered! He was a hero—an inspiration! And yet, maybe he was just an old fool with an empty, hair-brained scheme that wouldn't work! Another crackpot—a kind of fanatical inventor, perhaps, who deluded himself into believing in a worthless idea! A ship on Mars, loaded with something. What?

Ron struggled to be reasonable, fighting the mad fury that prompted him to be rash, to believe what the old horticulturist had said and fly to Mars. Such action might give the colonists here on Titan false hope. Hope that would encourage them to stay, when maybe they should be leaving with their wives and children.

"It's stupid!" Ron growled at last. "A shipload of some kind of mysterious elixer! Scatter the stuff around on Titan! It'll defeat the Callistans! Bunk! What kind of a magic charm is this, anyway? Arne was a swell old guy, all right; but he fussed too much with his flower garden, and dreamed and wished too much!" All of Ron's cynical, bitter, doubting viewpoint, seemed to boil from his lips. "I've got to see that the colonists leave Titan!"

"I won't leave for one!" Edward Clay, 

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