to. Fatty handled the tiller and I crewed. That way, we only needed ballast forward.

Neither of us were crazy about fishing. We'd made that up as an excuse for Edna. Sailing in the moonlight in the great, big loneliness of Cassowary Cove, with the smells of the Atlantic resting quietly around us—that was all the wallop we wanted.

"But suppose," I said, as soon as I'd trimmed sail, "suppose we got to Venus and there's a kind of animal there that finds us more appetizing than chili con carne. And suppose they're smarter than we are and have disintegrators and heat-rays like that fellow described in the story. And the minute they see us, they'll yell, 'Oh, boy—rations!' and come piling down on Earth.

"That'll do your business a lot of good, won't it? Why, when we get through driving them back off the planet, won't be a man or woman who'll be able to think of interplanetary travel without spitting. I go along with Reverend Pophurst: we shouldn't poke our noses into strange places where they were never meant to go or we'll get them bitten off."

Fatty thought a while and patted his stomach with his free hand like he always does when I score a good point. Most folks in town don't know it, but Fatty and I usually get so lathered up in arguments just before Election Day, that we always vote opposite tickets, no matter what.

"First place, if we hit animals smart enough to have disintegrators and suchlike when we don't have them, and if they want this planet, they're going to take it away from us, and no movie hero in a tight jumper and riding boots is going to stop them at the last minute by discovering that the taste of pickled beets kills 'em dead. If they're smarter than we are and have more stuff, we'll be licked, that's all. We just won't be around any more, like the dinosaur. Second place, didn't you read Professor Fronac's article in last week's Sunday Supplement? He says there can't be any smarter animals—Say! What'd you call that? There, over to starboard?"

I turned and looked off to the right.

Where a streak of moonlight grinned on the water between the lips of the cove, something green and bulbous was coming in fast. It looked like the open top of an awfully big umbrella. I judged it to be thirty-five, forty feet across. It was floating straight for Mike's Casino on the southern lip where lights were blazing, music was banging, and people generally were having themselves a whale of a time.

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