can't stop to dine. But—"

He kissed her hungrily. Five days—six, now—in space suits with the girl one hopes to marry has its drawbacks. An armored arm around the hulking shoulders of another suit of armor—even with a pretty girl inside it—is not satisfying. To hold hands with three-eighth-inch space gloves is less than romantic. And to try to kiss a girl three-quarters buried in a space helmet leaves much to the imagination. Stan kissed her. It took another shifting movement of the yacht, which toppled them the length of the cabin, to make him stop.

Then he laughed and went to the control room.

Vision screens were useless, of course. The little ship was still most of her length under sand, but the repellers' cones of thrust had dug a great pit down to her. Now Stan juggled the repellers to take fullest advantage of the storm. At times—with both beams pushing up—the ship was perceptibly lifted by uprushing air. And Stan could be prodigal with power, now. The skid was sharply limited in its storage of energy, but all the space between the two skins of the Erebus was a power bank. It could travel from one rim of the Galaxy to the other without exhausting its store. And the upward lift of whirlwinds—once there were six within ten minutes—and the thrusts of the repellers gradually edged the Erebus to the surface.

Before nightfall it no longer lay in a sand pit. It was only half buried in sand. And when the winds died down to merely savage gales, at twilight, and then slowly diminished to more angry gusts, and at long last there was calm without and even the impalpable fine dust that settled last no longer floated in the air, and the stars shone—then Stan was ready.

He turned on the ship's communicator and sent a full-power wave out into the night. He spoke. What he said would be unintelligible, of course, but he said sardonically to the empty desert:

"Yacht Erebus calling! Down on the desert, every drive smashed, and not so much as a hand-blaster on board for a weapon. Maybe you'd like to come and get us!"

Then—and only then—he went and ate the long delayed meal Esther had made ready.

It was half an hour before the microphones gave warning. Then they relayed clankings and poundings and thuddings on the sand. It was the sound of heavy machines marching toward the Erebus. Scores of them. The machines separated and encircled the disabled yacht, though they were invisible behind the dunes all about. And then, simultaneously, they closed in.

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