deep-space experience, could not help but feel a twinge of vertigo as he looked up into the haloed face of the heavenly giant that filled a quarter of the inverted bowl of ebony that the heavens had become.

Everyone was relieved to lift ship, however, for the thought of being caught grounded by any roving Martian spaceship was not pleasant to contemplate. Atomic bombs had long been obsolete, but one such would certainly suffice to exterminate four grounded spacecraft. Then too, they were all glad to get away from the glaring spectre that so eerily filled too much of the sky ... the ringed Saturn had a hypnotic effect that left a man shaken.

In the Control of the Darkside Chavez whispered to Scott: "We were thinking that you were going to lose the Darky ... and it turns out that poor old Drew is the one who lost his command."

"He should be glad to get rid of it."

"But what," asked Chavez, "is the old man going to do with her?"

Scott shrugged and spoke succinctly. "Bait." His spirits had risen considerably when Hartnett had left him in command of the Darkside, contrary to his expectations. He reflected somewhat ruefully that it did a man good to have a scare thrown into him from time to time. Even now, rapidly approaching a quadrant heavy with Cat warships, he could feel contented in merely feeling his beloved tin can responding under his hands on the control panels.

A thousand yards behind and astern, the unmanned Artemis followed the Darkside like a dog on a leash, its myriad functions controlled by an invisible chain of subetheric impulses from jerry-rigged remote controls on the Darkside's gun-deck.

In the faint light of the faraway sun, where the irrepressible Blake had sloshed paint on her flank, gleamed the legend: BOOBY TRAP.

Like shadows, the four ships of Flotilla Blue Three slipped through the patrol cordons of the Martian Space Force. In the infinite vastnesses of the interplanetary deeps they were unnoticed. Blast tubes silent, guided only by the ever increasing gravitational attraction of mammoth Uranus, and the reaction of whining gyroscopes.

Beneath them, its greenish disk ever increasing, lay Uranus ... cold, harsh, forbidding. The thick atmosphere of methane and ammonia lay in great turbulent belts, whipped to maniacal fury by the eternal storms that swept the unguessable surface of the ghastly planet.

Blake 

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