dark waters of the great Northwestern Canal. Commander Gurney's own private cruiser, the White Hawk!

How much of his mental audacity was inspired by sheer desperation Langford could not guess. But he suddenly saw himself climbing out of a thrumming jet plane in deep shadows and running straight toward the cruiser with Joan at his side.

He saw the cruiser ascending, saw himself at the controls, with the red disk of Mars dwindling beyond the viewport. He saw the myriad stars of space and the rapidly expanding disk of the Earth pierced by wavering banners of light.

And then it dawned on him that in some strange way Joan had seen the vision first and was sharing it with him. He knew then that he could not fail.

4

Beneath the descending cruiser the roof of the forest gleamed in russet and emerald splendor above a labyrinth of wooded archipelagoes.

It still seemed a little like a dream to Langford, but he knew that it wasn't. The vision that he had experienced three days before, standing beside his wife in a white-walled room, had taken on the bright, firm texture of reality.

He stood before the controls, with a thrumming deck under him, and studied the shifting landscape through the White Hawk's viewport. He had never before flown directly over the Amazon Basin, and a river of shining wonder seemed to flow into his mind as he stared.

It was Joan who broke the spell. She tugged gently at his arm, her face anxious. "I don't see any sign of the three rivers!" she exclaimed. "Do you?"

Langford swung about. "We haven't passed the great cataract of Itamaraca yet," he said. "It rushes straight along for five or six miles. Then it becomes the most impressive waterfall in South America. A few miles below the falls the river spreads out into a lake."

Langford turned back to the viewport. "When we see the lake we can look for another branching and the island. The island is right in the middle of the three rivers you saw in your vision. But it's just a dot on the electrograph. Are you sure it has a distinctive shape?"

"It has a high, rocky shoreline," Joan assured him. "The central tributary cuts it in half and the other rivers flow around it. It's heavily forested, but the rent in the foliage where the ship came down is so wide you should be able to see it from ten 

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