Healey. "The worst of it is, any of us may do the same thing as Philipuster when he least expects it."

"Not I, sir," said Healey earnestly. "I've learned my lesson. I'll never make an idle remark that might hurt somebody else."

"Well, let's hope so. By the way, your paper offered considerable proof that the Lemurians, so-called, possessed the secret of counteracting gravity."

"Yes, sir."

Pickens eyed him. "If we had that secret here, Lieutenant, what a time-saver it would be!"

Healey's eyes began to glow. "You're right, sir. I hadn't really connected it up. Rocket travel would be a cinch, wouldn't it? We'd go to Mars fast."

Pickens nodded. "I wonder just why Philipuster had you sent here," he said. "Is he deliberately putting you in a place where you can fight back?"

Healey looked at Pickens. The older man was not bitter or cynical, as he might have been. He was fighting back, yes. He was a rebel with bared teeth. But he wasn't fighting Philipuster or even the big brass in the Air Marines. His fight was with the hide-bound customs of the Marines.

Healey, too, began to see beyond any doubt that the only hope of beating down that two-hundred-year-old tradition was to do something extraordinary, something constructive and something which the whole world would talk about and would respect.

"Yes, sir," he said, and his voice for the first time was vibrant with hope. "Perhaps he is. When do we start for Mars, sir?"

But there followed three years of hard work before they could get started. Commander Pickens knew his business. He was thorough and he was a driver and a leader. Young Lieutenant Healey found that out very soon. And he also discovered that every man on the base was fighting for the right to go up with Pickens and the ship.

The World Council allotted them plenty of money in the interest of research. Pickens hired cowboys from the ranches, miners from the mountains, and farmers from the dry-land of Wyoming to do the manual labor, while they, the two hundred former officers, and Healey, who never had been an officer, worked day and night and in between times.

They got the ship ready. It was a big one, close to eight hundred feet long, and they had built it in an enormous launching-rack out in the middle of the desert where it 

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