“I own the picture. I paid him for it. But he was the only man who knew how to make the Zonals work for the camera. See the catch, Tony?”

“You want me to finish the pic. A nice easy job. Why not fake the rest of it?”

“I don’t dare,” Von Zorn admitted frankly. “I’ve already blurbed this as the real thing. It’d raise too big a howl if we used robots. I can imagine what that Carlyle dame would do.”

Quade grinned maliciously.

“Catch-’em-Alive” Carlyle, interplanetary explorer extraordinary, was Von Zorn’s vulnerable point, his heel of Achilles.

“She’s suing me,” Von Zorn said, breathing audibly. “For libel. Says the Gerri Murri cartoons are libelous.”

“Well, aren’t they?” Quade asked. This animated cartoon series, depicting Gerry Carlyle as an inquisitive bug-eyed Venusian Murri, had proved immensely popular with everybody but Gerry. She had created a fair-sized riot in Froman’s Mercurian Theatre when she first recognized her counterpart on the screen.

“We won’t discuss that—that—” Von Zorn gulped and finished weakly, “that tomato. Do you want to see Udell’s film on the Zonals?”

“Might as well,” Quade agreed, getting up. “I may get some ideas about his method.”

“You’d better get some ideas,” Von Zorn said darkly, “or we’ll all be in the soup.”

CHAPTER IITrip to Titan

The next morning Quade went to the spaceport to examine Udell’s wrecked ship, which had arrived in tow a few hours before. Von Zorn was with him and at the last moment Kathleen, scenting something interesting, attached herself to Quade’s elbow and would not be dislodged.

Quade was not entirely happy about her presence, because of a vague uneasiness he could not name. He had hunches like that occasionally. He felt one strongly now about the wrecked ship and the dangers that might lie dormant there.

“You see, silly, nothing’s wrong,” Kathleen said impatiently as they stood in the great torn hole that had been the ruined ship’s side. The vessel, a small, six-man job, was warped and twisted grotesquely by the impact of the meteor, which had ripped completely through the walls of the control room and emerged into space on the other side. The bodies had been removed, but nothing else was yet touched.

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