have no choice. If I deserted them now, I'd only prove myself to be the yellow rat you seem to think I am. Anyway, this trick of bringing that ship back from Mars, is a real, man-size job."

Deliberately, Ron closed the flier's door. He worked the controls. The ship shot up over the blackened, smoke-wreathed plains of Leiccsenland, where splendid corn and grain had grown, under the stimulus of special vitalizing radiations, mixed with the ordinary light and heat that Bart Mallory's sun-ray globes emitted.

In a twinkling, Leiccsenland and Titan were dwindling away, below. In brief minutes, even the bulk of giant Saturn and his Rings and ten glowing moons were shrinking away astern. Ahead was the tiny sun, Mars and Earth and Venus completely lost in its rays.

"Pray for speed, Miss Charles," Ron grated grimly. "Pray that we make this trip in time! And that Arne Reynaud's idea is something better than the froth of an addled brain!"

Their velocity was demoniac. But the distance they had to go was tremendous. They plotted a course across the orbit of Jupiter, and through the dangerous Belt of Asteroids. Luckily, Mars and Saturn, in their respective orbital positions, were near their closest possible approach to each other. So the journey was about as short as it could ever be.

The spacial stars leered sardonically, and Ron and Anna stuck to their posts like fiends, charting, piloting, keeping watch for meteors in that dangerous region of cosmic debris, the Asteroid Belt. There was no time for quarreling, there was no time for sentiment, there was little enough time to eat, and only moments for sleep.

Thus they reached Vananis, the gigantic spaceport set amidst the rusty red deserts of Mars. But even then it was only the beginning. Two Earth-weeks it had taken to come. And it would take longer to return; for on their trip back their ship would not be a slim scout, but a heavy freighter instead.

They were directed to it there at the quays. The Barbarian was the name painted on its beetling black prow. It was a black ship, as were all the space craft of Earth—slender, quite speedy, judging from its lines and the power rating of its engines and gravity repulsion plates. It was an old grain-carrying ship. Its cargo hatches were battened down firmly, and could not easily have been removed.

"What does its cargo consist of?" Ron Leiccsen asked, after Anna and he had presented their 

 Prev. P 9/29 next