find a planet on which they could land.

Their attempt to approach Cetis Alpha VI had been the exact type of all their fruitless efforts. They came in for a landing, and while yet millions of miles out, recently reinstalled detector-screens searched them out. Newly stepped-up long distance psychographic finders had identified the "Starshine" as containing living human beings. Then projectors, taken out of museums, had hurled at them the deadly pain-beams which had made war futile a thousand years before. They might have died within one second, from the bursting of their hearts and the convulsive rupture of every muscular anchorage to every bone, except for one thing.

Kim's contrived wristlets had saved them. The wristlets, plus a relay on a set of controls to throw the "Starshine" into overdrive travel through space. The wristlets contained a morsel of hafnium, so that any previous psychographic record of them as individuals would no longer check with the psychogram a search-beam would encounter. But also, on the first instant of convulsive contraction of muscles beneath the wristlets, they emitted a frantic, tiny signal. That signal kicked over the control-relay. The "Starshine" flung itself into overdrive escape, faster than light, faster than the pain-beams could follow.

They had suffered, of course. Horribly. But the pain-beams could not play upon them for more than the tenth of a millisecond before the "Starshine" vanished into faster-than-light escape. They had tried each of the six planets of Cetis Alpha. They had gone rather desperately to Cetis Gamma, with four inhabited planets, and Sorene, with three. Then the inroads on their scant fuel-supply and their dwindling store of vegetation from Alphin II made them accept defeat. The massed volumes of the Galactic Pilot for this sector, age-yellowed, brittle volumes, now had told them of vegetation on the useless planet of the dwarf star Phanis. They came to it. Kim was stunned and bitter. And they landed.

After the ship had settled down in a weird valley with fantastic overhanging cliffs and a frozen small waterfall nearby, the two of them went outside. They wore space-suits, of course, because of the extreme thinness of the air.

"I suppose we can call this home, now," Kim said bitterly.

It was night. The sky was cloudless, and all the stars of the galaxy looked down upon them as they stood in the biting cold. His voice went by space-phone to the helmet of Dona, by his side.

"I guess I can stand it if you can, Kim," she said quietly.

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