"Get back!" he ordered hoarsely. And as Harb Land, blindly raging, came on: "I don't want to kill anybody!"

Jonny's voice rang command. The lame youngster's thin brown face was set, but he had not lost calm.

"Harb, stop!"

The thing froze into a queer sort of tableau as Harb Land pulled up and stood there, his giant figure quivering with wrath, his big fists clenched as he glared at Carlin.

"I told you," Harb said thickly over his shoulder to his brother. "I told you what would happen if we took him in."

Marn had run toward them, her face pale and stricken.

"It's my fault, Jonny," she said despairingly. "I heard him come out and followed him, but let him take my gun instead of shooting."

"Quiet, Marn," soothed Jonny. "It's going to be all right. Carlin just doesn't understand."

The lame youngster, in this taut moment of strain, was suddenly the biggest of them, the dominating personality here.

"I understand, all right," Carlin said hotly. "I guessed it tonight, and one look at that magnetic dredge confirmed my guess." His voice crackled with the rising wrath he felt. "Going to Mercury prospecting, were you? You never had any such plan. You and your partners have been getting ready to attempt sun-mining."

Jonny's eyes and voice were calm as he said:

"Carlin, Earth's starved for power. You've seen for yourself. To get the power that will revive our world, we've got to have copper. And the copper in our planets was exhausted long ago. But there's still billions of tons of copper in our System, in one place. The Sun. It's there in hot gases, more copper than Earth and our sister-planets will need for millenniums to come. It's our only possible source of copper and we intend to tap it."

"You and the others have brooded so long over your need for copper that you've gone crazy!" Carlin said, his voice whipped with anger.

"What's crazy about our using the copper of the Sun for our planet?" Jonny asked evenly.

"You, a CE, ask me that?" cried Carlin. "You know as well as I do that sun-mining brings catastrophe! Oh, you can get close enough to the Sun in your ship, I know. You can suck up all the 

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