We've got a lot to do before daylight!"

He had traveled probably fifty miles before her signal came in. Then there was a frantically anxious time until he found the little, helpless space yacht, tumbled on the desert sand, with Esther peering hopefully out of the air-lock as he swooped down to a clumsy landing. She was warned and ready. There was no hope of repairing the drive. A burned-out drive to operate in a Bowdoin-Hall field calls for bars of allotropic graphite—graphite in a peculiar energy state as different from ordinary graphite as carbon diamond is from carbon coal. There were probably monster bars of just such stuff in the giant grid's motors, but the skid could not handle them. For tonight, certainly, repair was out of the question. Esther had hooked up a tiny, low-power signaling device which gave out a chirping wave every five seconds. She wore a space suit, had two abandon-ship kits, and all the water that could be carried.

The skid took off again. It was not designed to work in a planet's gravitational field. It used too much power, and it wabbled erratically, and for sheer safety Stan climbed high. With closed faceplates the space-suited figures seemed to soar amid the stars. They could speak only by radio, close together as they were.

"Wh-where are we going, Stan?"

"Icecap," said Stan briefly. "North Pole. There's water there—or hoarfrost, anyhow. And the day storms won't be so bad if there are storms at all. In the tropics on this planet the normal weather is a typhoon-driven sandstorm. We'll settle down in the polar area and wait for Rob Torren to come for us. It may be three months or more."

"Rob Torren—"

"He helped me escape," said Stan briefly. "Tell you later. Watch ahead."

He'd had no time for emotional thinking since his landing, and particularly since the landing of the little space yacht now sealed up and abandoned to be buried under the desert sand. But he knew how Esther came to be here. She'd told him, by radio, first off. She'd had news of the charges Rob Torren had brought against him. She hadn't believed them. Not knowing of his embarcation for Earth for court-martial—the logical thing would have been a trial at advanced base—she'd set out desperately to assure him of her faith.

She couldn't get a liner direct, so she'd set out alone in her little space yacht. In a sense, it should have been safe enough. Craft equipped with Bowdoin-Hall drive were all 

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