surface and from time to time dump that sand down to the ground. It did not make sense.

Stan had a more immediate problem than the purpose of the grid, though. He was three hundred feet above ground. He was short of food and hopelessly short of water. When day came again, this place would be the center of a hurricane of blown sand. On the ground, lashed to a metal column, he had been badly buffeted about even in his space suit. Up here the wind would be much stronger. It was not likely that any possible lashing would hold him against such a storm. He could probably get back to the ground, of course, but there seemed no particular point to it.

As he debated, there came a thin, shrill whistling overhead. It came from the far south, and passed overhead, descending, and—going down in pitch—it died away to the northward. The lowering of its pitch indicated that it was slowing. The sound was remarkably like that of a small space craft entering atmosphere incompletely under control—which was unthinkable, of course, on the solitary unnamed planet of Khor Alpha. And Stan felt very, very lonely on a huge plate of iron thirty stories above the ground, on an alien planet under unfriendly stars, and with this cryptic engineering monstrosity breaking away to sheer desert on one side and extending uncounted miles in all others. He flicked on his suit-radio, without hope.

There came the loud, hissing static. Then under and through it came the humming carrier-wave of a yacht transmitter sending on emergency power.

"Help call! Help call! Space yacht Erebus grounded on planet of Khor Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in darkness, outside conditions unknown. If anyone hears, p-please answer! M-my landing drive smashed when I hit ground, too! Help call! Help call! Space yacht Erebus grounded on planet of Khor Alpha, main drive burned out, landed in darkness—"

Stan Buckley had no power. He could not move from this spot. The Erebus had grounded somewhere in the desert which covered all the planet but this one structure. When dawn came, the sandstorm would begin again. And with its main drive burned out, its landing drive smashed—when the morrow's storms began it would be strange indeed if the whirlwinds did not scoop away sand from about the one solid object they'd encounter, so that the little craft would topple down and down and ultimately be covered over, buried under maybe hundreds of feet of smothering stuff.

He knew the Erebus. Of course. It belonged to Esther Hume. The voice from it was Esther's—the girl he was to have 

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