a hard-bitten young farmer with a craggy jaw, stated definitely. "Me and Pa and my wife have been here five years. Not a chance of me going, now! I'll stick, if only to even the odds for Arne Reynaud! Maybe he was an idiot, but he had courage!"

Bart Mallory, who had invented the atomic sun-ray towers, and held their patent rights for the exclusive use of the Titan Colony, was present, too. All of his small, nervous body, even his neatly kept Van Dyke beard, trembled with rage and grief.

"Arne was a good, practical man, when it came to taking care of fruit trees," he said. "But he was certainly no highly trained scientist. I haven't much faith in whatever his idea can be, either. Still, he was my friend. If I ran away from Titan, now that he's been killed, I'd feel like a dirty, yellow coward!"

Most of the other farmers had left the front of the bank building, to fight the fire across the street. But several of those who remained, nodded agreement with Bart Mallory. After all, everything they owned was on Titan. It was their home.

"If you don't go to Mars for that ship, Ron Leiccsen," Anna Charles said quietly, "I will! I know how to fly space-crafts as well as you do, anyway. My father was a racing pilot, and he taught me a few tricks of the trade! What Arne Reynaud said may be bunk; but there's a chance!"

Ron Leiccsen only growled inarticulately, and hurried off toward the blazing buildings. He had to fight something to expend some of his physical energies so that he could think, and clear his brain. Fighting the fire might do this. The release of atomic heat in the incandescent substance from the shattered sun-ray globe had ceased when the tower had collapsed; for the catalytic forces which induced the breakdown of the atoms had been cut off with the disruption of the apparatus. But the spilled contents of the globe were still terrifically hot. Only sand, poured on that dazzling fury, could cool and insulate it. And water was needed to quench the blazing debris of the buildings. So Ron Leiccsen worked like a demon with the other men.

And from the village jailhouse, opposite the row of fire-wracked ruins, hollow, booming laughter mocked him. There a Callistan combat pilot, captured some time ago when his ship had been shot down, clutched the bars of his prison's window with slender, furry, three-fingered hands, and made derisive, gloating remarks in his sketchy English.

"Eart'men! Vaah!" he taunted, his words rumbling in 

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