"Listen! The yacht's buried directly under us. Maybe ten feet, maybe fifty, maybe Heaven knows how deep! There's a bare chance that if we get to it we can do something, with what I know now about the machines in use here. It's the only chance I know, and it's not a good one. It's only fair to tell you—"

"I'll try anything," said her voice in his helmet, "with you."

He swallowed. Then he stayed awake and desperately alert, his suit-microphones at their highest pitch of sensitivity, during the long and deadly monotonous hours of the night.

There was no alarm. When the sky grayed to the eastward, he showed her how he hoped to reach the yacht. The drive of the skid, of course, was not a pulsatory field such as even the smallest of space yachts used. It was more nearly an adaptation of a meteor-repeller beam, a simple reactive thrust against an artificial-mass field. It was the first type of drive ever to lift a ship from Earth. For take-off and landing and purposes like meteor mining it is still better than the pulsating-field drive by which a ship travels in huge if unfelt leaps. But in atmosphere it does produce a tremendous black-blast of repelled air. It is never used on atmosphere-flyers for that very reason, but Stan proposed to make capital of its drawback for his purpose.

When he'd finished his explanation, Esther was more than a little pale, but she smiled gamely.

"All right, Stan. Go ahead!"

"We'll save power if we wait for the winds," he told her.

Already, though, breezes stirred across the dawn-lit sand. Already they were hot breezes. Already the fine, impalpable sand dust which settled last at nightfall was rising in curious opaque clouds which billowed and curled and blotted out the horizon. But the grid was hidden by the bulge of the planet's surface.

Stan pointed the little skid downward in a hollow he scooped out with his space-gloved hands. He set the gyros running to keep it pointed toward the buried yacht. He had Esther climb up behind him. He lashed the two of them together, and strapped them to the skid. And he waited.

In ten minutes after the first sand grains pelted on his armor, the sky was hidden by the finer dust. In twenty there were great gusts which could be felt even within the space suits. In half an hour a monster gale blew.

Stan turned on the space 

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