came up to Carlin.

"I want to apologize. I never thought any star-world stranger would come in with us and help us."

"Save it, and get the welders on those rear feed-pipes," Carlin retorted. "Get in here—I'll show you."

Through the hot afternoon hours, the hiss of ato-welders and reek of fusing metal stifled the workshop.

Dripping with perspiration, stiff from cramped postures, Carlin worked on inside the great dredge.

And all those hours, in rhythm with the welders' hiss and the clang of wrenches, his thoughts beat a mocking tempo through his brain.

"All this, for no reason! For somebody else's world, a world that ought to have been evacuated long ago! Even if it succeeds, you win nothing. And if it fails, the Sun licks you all up like midges."

Yet he labored blindly on. It might be crazy, but what he had started, he would finish.

It was work against an inexorable time limit that rapidly was approaching. As the shadows lengthened, as the sun went down, they still had not finished.

Jonny Land limped unsteadily to turn on the workshop lights. His face was a gray mask of fatigue and sweat as he turned to the others.

"Two more hours," he said huskily. "We can't take more, if we're to get the dredge into the 'Phoenix' and take off before midnight."

Those two hours, afterward, seemed weeks in length to Carlin. And the mocking devil in his brain kept taunting, "It's no business of yours, you know!"

"That's near enough!" Jonny's hoarse voice finally declared. "We can hook up those last cables on the way. All the work that require heavy tools is done—and we daren't take more time."

They were, all of them, drunk with fatigue, staggering with the furious drive of twelve hours of unbroken toil. Blackened by welder flare, glistening with sweat, they looked to Carlin like a crew of devils.

Jonny's driving energy remained unconquerable.

"Marn," he ordered, "back the big truck in here. Harb, you and Carlin rig the hoist."

The big, flat-bodied ato-truck backed ponderously 

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