soberly, and there was no hostility in her face. "But you'll find out that Jonny knows what he's doing."

Out of the darkness behind them spoke a shrill voice that made Laird Carlin swing around in astonishment.

"Well, I'm blamed glad you people quit arguin' for tonight, anyway. It's time all decent folks was in bed."

Gramp Land stood back there in the dark where he had apparently been standing for some time. There was a grin on his withered face as he lowered the heavy atom-gun he had been holding.

"Sure got tired holdin' this thing aimed at your back, Mr. Carlin," he chuckled.

CHAPTER VI

"You Owe a Chance to Earth!"

Doubts assailed Carlin almost as soon as he retired. He could not sleep, the rest of that night.

Had he been childish to let Jonny persuade him into giving the plan a hearing? Jonny was sincere enough, but he was a fanatic on this one subject of securing power for Earth.

The recklessness of Earthmen was proverbial. These men, made desperate by long brooding over the poverty of their world, might think little of the danger of provoking solar catastrophe in their obsessed desire to secure copper.

Carlin chilled. He remembered what had happened years ago at the star Mizar when Sun-mining had been attempted. The suck of magnetic dredges swiftly creating a whirl in the star's surface gases, a Sun-spot maelstrom that had expanded with disastrous swiftness. And then the engulfing of the mining ships in the sudden outpour of increased heat, the scorching of inner planets that wreaked ruin before the spots subsided.

It had been the same later at Polaris, and at Delta Gemini. No wonder that such a popular wrath against Sun-mining had arisen that Control Council had strictly forbidden further attempts! Man's science, great as it was, was not yet great enough to dare tampering with stars.

Yet he could see, too, how these Earthmen would inevitably turn their thoughts to Sun-mining. There was not any copper left in their System except in one body—their Sun. And that had limitless amounts of the power-metal, in vaporized form. No wonder they had been led into the plan to tap the metal of their Sun.

Carlin dozed 

 Prev. P 30/54 next