quite capable of interstellar flight. Power was certainly no problem any more, and with extra capacitors to permit of low-frequency pulsations of the drive field, and mapped dwarf white stars as course markers, navigation should be simple enough. The journey, as such, was possibly rash but it was not foolhardy. Only—she hadn't fused her drive when she changed its pulsation-frequency. And when she was driving past Khor Alpha, her Bowdoin-Hall field had struck the space skid on which Stan was trying to make this planet, and the field had drained his power.

The short circuit blew the skid's fuse, but it burned out the yacht's more delicate drive. Specifically, it overloaded and ruined the allotropic carbon blocks which made the drive work. So Esther's predicament was caused not only by her solicitude for Stan, but by the drive of the skid on which he'd escaped from the Stallifer.

He blamed himself. Bitterly. But even more he blamed Rob Torren. Hatred surged up in him again for the man who had promised to come here and fight him to the death. But he said quietly:

"Rob's coming here after me. We'll talk about that later. He didn't guess this place would be without water and with daily hurricanes everywhere except—I hope!—the poles. He thought I'd be able to make out until he could come back. We've got to! Watch out ahead for the sunset line. We've got to follow it north until we hit the polar cap. With water and our kits we should be able to survive indefinitely."

The space-suited figures were close together—in fact, in contact. But there was no feeling of touching each other through the insulating, almost inflexible armor of their suits. And sealed as they were in their helmets and communicating only by phone in the high stratosphere, neither could feel the situation suitable for romance. Esther was silent for a time. Then she said:

"You told me you were out of power—"

"I was," he told her. "I got some from the local inhabitants—if they're local."

"What—"

He described the preposterous, meaningless structure on the desert. Thousands of square miles in extent. Cryptic and senseless and of unimaginable significance.

"Every slab has a motor to turn it. I cut into a housing and there was power there. I loaded up with it. I can't figure the thing out. There's nowhere that a civilized or any other race could live. There's nothing those 

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