were you doing right then? You were pretty unoccupied and you should have seen him coming! But did you?"

"Hah! You thought he was a Portuguese Man-of-War. Like the time we were shingling the church roof and you thought that the black spot near the steeple was a sheet of metal when all the time it was only a hole. We wouldn't have fallen past the beam either, if you weren't such a big fat slob."

Fatty stood up and waved his stomach at me. "For a little hen-pecked squirt, you sure—Hey, Paul, don't let's get going this way. We don't know how long we may have to be together on this flea-bitten rowboat and we don't want to start arguing."

He was right. I apologized. "My fault, that church roof—"

"No, my fault," he insisted generously. "I was a little too heavy at that moment. Shake, old pal, and let's keep our heads. We'll be the only representatives of humanity wherever we're heading, and we have to stick together."

We shook and had a glass of beer on it.

All the same, it did get tight as steak dinner followed steak dinner and 'Did Your Mother Come From Ireland?' went through chorus after chorus. We carved a checkerboard out of some deck-boards and tore up old newspaper to make checkers. We went for swims around the boat, and we made up little guessing games to try on each other. We tested the gray haze and thought up a thousand different ways that the boxes might be working, a thousand different explanations of the spot of color near the top, a thousand different reasons for our being bubbled and sent out into the wild black yonder.

But we were down to counting stars when the red planet began to grow large.

"Mars," Fatty said. "It looks like the picture of Mars in the article Professor Fronac had in the Sunday supplement."

"I wish he were here instead of us. He wanted to go to Mars. We didn't."

There wasn't a cloud in the sky at Mars as we came down through the clearest air I've ever seen. We landed ever so gently in a flat desert of red sand. On all sides of the gray ball we could see acres on acres of sand.

Nothing else.

"Don't know if this is much of an improvement on what we've been through," I remarked morosely.

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