She looked at it hungrily. Kim regarded it steadily. They did not speak for a long time.

"It would be nice there," Dona said longingly, at last. "Do you think we can land, Kim?"

"We're going to try," he told her.

But they didn't. They were forty million miles away when a sudden overwhelming anguish smote them both. All the Universe ceased to be....

Six weeks later, Kim Rendell eased the Starshine to a landing on the solitary satellite of the red dwarf sun Phanis. It was about four thousand miles in diameter. Its atmosphere was about one-fourth the density needed to support human life. Such vegetation as it possessed was stunted and lichenous. The terrain was tumbled and upheaved, with raw rock showing in great masses which had apparently solidified in a condition of frenzied turmoil. It had been examined and dismissed as useless for human colonization many centuries since. That was why Kim and Dona could land upon it.

They had spent half their store of fuel in the desperate effort to 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 searchbeam 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 or more than the tenth of a 

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