impinging of a Bowdoin-Hall field upon the skid. Some other space ship than the Stallifer, using Khor Alpha as a course guide, had flashed past the one-planet system at many hundred times the speed of light. The pulsations of its drive field had struck the skid and drained its drive of power, and unquestionably had registered the surge. But it was not likely that it would be linked with Stan's disappearance. The other ship might be headed for a star system light-centuries from Earth, and a minute—relatively a minute—joggle of its meters would not be a cause for comment. The real seriousness of the affair was that the skid had drained power before its fuse blew.

That property of a Bowdoin-Hall field, incidentally—its trick of draining power from any drive unit in its range—is the reason that hampers its use save in deep space. Liners have to be elaborately equipped with fuses lest in shorting each other's drives they wreck their own. In interplanetary work, fuses are not even practical because they might be blown a hundred times in a single voyage. Within solar systems high-frequency pulsations are used, so that no short can last more than the hundred-thousandth of a second, in which time not even allotropic graphite can be ruined.

Stan, then, was desperately short of power and had to use it in a gravitational field which was prodigally wasteful of it. He had to rise high above the sandstorm before he saw the black area again at the planet's very rim. He headed for it in the straightest of straight lines. As he drove, the power-gauge needle flickered steadily over toward zero. A meteor miner does not often use as much as one earth-gravity acceleration, and Stan had to use that much merely to stay aloft. The black area, too, was all of a hundred-odd miles away, and after some millions of miles of space travel, the skid was hard put to make it.

He dived for the black thing as it drew near, and on his approach it appeared simply impossible. It was a maze, a grid, of rectangular girders upholding a seemingly infinite number of monstrous dead-black slabs. There was a single layer of those slabs, supported by innumerable spidery slender columns. Here, in the dawn belt, there was no wind and Stan could see clearly. Sloping down, he saw that ten-foot columns of some dark metal rose straight and uncompromising from a floor of sand to a height of three hundred feet or more. At their top were the grid and the slabs, forming a roof some thirty stories above the ground. There were no under-floors, no cross-ways, no structural features of any sort between the sand from which the columns rose and that queer and discontinuous roof.

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