to kill us to study the problem we presented. That's their idea, no doubt. And they've all the resources of a civilization that's old and scientific. They'll apply them all to get us—and they won't even think of listening to us! Stan! What can we do?"

Stan said amusedly, there in the still, frigid night of an unnamed planet, "Why—we'll do plenty! We're barbarians by comparison with them, Esther, and barbarians have equipment civilized men forget. All savages have spears, but a civilized man doesn't even always carry a pocketknife. If we can find the Erebus, we can probably defy this whole planet—until they put their minds to developing weapons. But right now you go to sleep. I'll watch."

Esther looked at him dubiously. Five days of sandstorms should have buried the little yacht irrecoverably.

"If it's findable," she said. Then she added wistfully, "But it would be nice to be on the Erebus again. It would feel so good to walk around without a space suit! And—" she added firmly, "after all, Stan, we are engaged! And if you think I like trying to figure out some way of getting kissed through an opened face-plate—"

Stan said gruffly, "Go to sleep!"

He paced up and down and up and down. They were remarkably unlike castaways in the space tale magazines. In those works of fiction, the hero is always remarkably ingenious. He contrives shelters from native growths on however alien a planet he and the heroine may have been marooned; he is full of useful odd bits of information which enable him to surprise her with unexpected luxuries, and he is inspired when it comes to signaling devices. But in five days on this planet, Stan had been able to make no use of any natural growth because there weren't any. He'd found no small luxuries for Esther because there was literally nothing about but sand. And there was strikingly little use in a fund of odd bits of information when there was only desert to apply it to—desert and sandstorms.

What he'd just told Esther was a guess; the best guess he could make, and a plausible one, but still a guess. The only new bit of information he'd picked up so far was the way the local inhabitants made electric motors. And he had to bet his and Esther's life on that!

He watched the chrono. And a good half hour before night would strike the checkerboard grid, he was verifying what few preparations he could make. A little later he waked Esther. And just about twenty minutes before the sunset line would reach the 

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