made those rustling noises.

The Zytztzes were exhibited in New York, London, Moscow, Sydney, San Francisco. But after three months they didn't look very good.

They seemed to be wilting a little. Their leaves didn't look as fresh and green as they had, and they drooped more and more as they went along.

Captain Healey was in charge of them, and he saw that they were surrounded with every condition they had known on Mars, even to a vacuum chamber with air of exactly the same proportions as that on Mars and at the same pressure and humidity and with the same variations of temperature, but it didn't help.

The only thing he could figure was that they were lonesome, so he persuaded the IWC that they should be taken back to Mars....

On that trip, they were allowed the freedom of the ship, and it did not take long to discover that they were born space-travelers. Mr. Zytztz stayed on the bridge with Healey a good deal, and when Lieutenant Browne, the navigator, was off duty, Mr. Zytztz would study the stars for hours, and presently his leaf-ends would delicately touch the controls as if he was suggesting a change in course.

"And confound it all," Healey told the Old Man, "he's always right when Browne checks on us."

Ether-travel in those days was very much dependent on navigation, for machinery had not yet been developed to allow for all the forces exerted by the various gravitational pulls, the solar drift, centrifugal inertia, strange magnetic currents, velocity, trajectory, planetary orbits, and the still unexplained ether drift. Or, rather, the machinery could be made, all right, but one ship couldn't carry it.

Whether Mr. Zytztz could see or not, he knew how to reach Mars, even though by that time the red planet was much farther away and it took over a month to get there. Mr. Zytztz would hover over the video screen for hours and then he would go to one of the portholes and stand for hours more, facing the constellation Vela at about fifty degrees minus declination. Sometimes he varied this by standing at the sky-chart and flipping its heavy linen pages with the tips of his leaves.

Captain Healey let him strictly alone, at first watching him, but presently not bothering to do that.

Mr. Zytztz learned what a pencil was for, and he would find a scratch-pad and make notes or calculations, consisting mostly 

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