their own lives to further the progress of mankind!"

The experience left Unterzuyder weak. He looked appealingly at Fayette. "I wonder if a glass of water—" he said feebly.

Hurriedly she disappeared to the apartment kitchen. Unterzuyder slumped lower in the seat, breathing hard.

"Maybe," he told Beecher helplessly, "a shot of whiskey would do the trick better."

"Sure thing!" Beecher went after his daughter. As soon as they were both out of the room, Unterzuyder got up and pulled open the drawer containing Tertium Organum, A Key To The Enigmas Of The World. Quickly he unfolded the chart in the back of the book. The map should be there.

It wasn't.

He slapped the drawer shut, sank feebly back to his seat. The Beechers were gone an inordinately long time. He thought he heard them whispering in the kitchen. Then Beecher lunged back into the room bearing a jigger of no doubt cheap rye. Unterzuyder gulped it down and put the glass to one side.

Fayette was admiring. "For a man in poor health," she exclaimed, "you take it without a whimper—or a chaser!"

"Eh?" Unterzuyder blinked, then drew himself up stiffly. "Whiskey is the only medicine my doctor permits. And now, let's get down to the matter of the contract!"

One month later.

Ralph Unterzuyder was furious. He stalked the darkened decks of the trembling space ship Ares—a slick hundred-tonner with sixty square feet of firing surface—and reflected that the Beechers were making a worse sucker out of him than he'd expected them to.

First, they were a pair of fakers. That much had been obvious from the start, with that phony newspaper write-up, all that bragging about their knowledge of fire-arms when they didn't even know enough to keep a weapon pointed toward the floor. Well, he'd expected that much. But to discover they did not even have basic knowledge of how to outfit an expedition!

They had actually begun ordering lumber for building, until he pointed out the climate of Titan might be kinder to prefabricated glassteel sections.

They had actually paid out money for seeds, bulbs, and saplings until he showed that all farming on Titan must for the present be on an experimental or at 

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