toward the summer polar cap.

Khor Alpha's single planet had gone unvisited by men during two centuries of interstellar travel, but now there had been three separate visitations within ten days.

The last of the three visitors settled to ground where hoarfrost partly whitened the desert's face. A full-power carrier-wave spread out from it. And in the control room of the Erebus a speaker suddenly barked savagely:

"Stan Buckley! I'm here to kill you! Communicate!"

Esther gasped. She recognized the voice. Rob Torren! Back more than two months before Stan had expected him! The words did not make sense to her. Stan had tried to spare her despair by concealing the fact that Torren's return would be to kill him, under a compact which her presence here made void.

"Rob!" cried Esther softly into the transmitter. "Rob Torren! It's Esther calling! Esther Hume!"

An indescribable sound from the speaker. With trembling hands she adjusted the vision receiver. She looked into the taut, drawn, raging features of Rob Torren. He stared at her out of the screen.

"Stan's asleep, Rob!" cried Esther eagerly. "He didn't expect you back for a long time yet! You're wondering how I got here? Oh—"

Laughing a little, joyously, she told of her desperate voyage to be with Stan when he should be tried, and how her drive had been burnt out by impinging on the drive of the space skid on which Stan had left the Stallifer. And of course she told of her subsequent meeting with Stan.

"And there are inhabitants here," she finished eagerly, "and they've been trying to kill us."

She was all joy and relief at Torren's arrival. But his face was ravaged by conflicting emotions, all of them intense and all harrowing.

"But—what's the matter, Rob?" she asked. "You look so queer!" Then she added in abrupt, startled doubt. "And Rob! Why did you say you had come back to kill Stan? You were joking, weren't you?"

He raged at her instantly. "He coached you, eh? To pretend you didn't know anything? Trying to make me take you both to safety on a promise of fighting me later? It won't work! I've a line on your wave and I'll be coming! I'll be coming fast! And maybe you've no weapons, but I have! I've a Space Guard one-man ship! I forced the 

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