the equator. I'm getting along fairly well with rebuilding our drive, but there's a long job ahead. If other planetary inhabitants don't find us and kill us, we're all right. If they do find us, what you do won't matter. Go along if you like, within reason. But I wish you could take Sattell with you."

That couldn't be done. The two-legged creatures hung about the ship wearing an air of happy anticipation when all the humans were inside, and flopping eagerly on their backs to be scratched, when they came out. But when Sattell tried to approach one of the creatures, they fled as if in terror. Not one had ever been knowingly within a hundred yards of him—and he hated them.

When Jerry first reported that they had some sort of language and could exchange simple facts—he didn't know whether they could exchange ideas or not—Sattell savagely insisted that those who knew of the existence of the ship should be killed, and any others who discovered it also killed. The idea would be to keep the news of the Danaë's landing from reaching whatever other race might inhabit the white spot of the heat-ray.

But there were always some of the furry ones around. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Maybe only the same ones came to the ship. Maybe they went away and others took their places. Neither Borden nor Jerry was sure, but both demurred at killing. Besides, the news had already gone as far as such creatures were likely to take it before Sattell proposed to wipe them out.

Sattell raged when he was overruled. He was overruled over most things because he couldn't be trusted. Borden wouldn't let him work on the drive. He might try to make sure that if he didn't get back to Earth, nobody else should, either.

Ellen took the dibble stick and the seed capsules and planted the crop that might supply them with food. Each seed was enclosed in a gelatine capsule with a bit of fertilizer and a spore culture of terrestrial soil micro-organisms. Planted, by the time moisture reached the seed there was a bed of Earth's own microscopic soil-flora around the seed to help it grow.

But Sattell couldn't be trusted to plant seed, either, if the others would benefit.

He couldn't even be allowed to work the fuel synthesizer. In that apparatus plain water entered a force-field in which H1 and H2 simply could not exist as molecules or ions. So the atoms frantically absorbed heat energy from their surroundings to make pseudo valence-bonds and develop giant hydrogen 

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