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the sun, changing velocity hour by hour, yet always moving toward that imaginary point in space where she would fall into orbit around the green world, at the very limit of its atmosphere.
    Then would come the moment of decision. Absolutely anything could be waiting for the yacht. It was already certain that a slug-ship floated on as the Marintha did, with the same ice-capped planet as its destination. But it had broken out of overdrive on the far side of the sun. It would not arrive before the Marintha had either made contact with a human civilization on the planet, or with a wrecked ship of the presumably human race—or possibly had run into a trap from which there was no escape.
    Howell tried to fit the pieces of the Marintha ’s situation into a pattern from which predictions could be made. But he failed completely. There was simply no alternative to the action he was taking. It offered only the remotest of favourable possibilities, but all other actions than this offered no favourable chances at all.
    The Marintha floated on toward the meeting place with the green world. Clouds could be seen to move across its sunward hemisphere. As the Marintha approached, Howell hooked up an extremely high-precision directional receiver and tried to pick up other signals such as any civilized planet must let escape to space. There were no spark-signals. There were no amplitude-modulated signals. No frequency-modulated sounds. There was static from thunderstorms. There was nothing else—except the endlessly repeated broadcast call and minute-long spoken message.
    “It can’t be a beacon,” said Howell harassedly, when the world he’d chosen was a huge round target shutting off much of the firmament. “It hasn’t range enough. It can’t be anything but a call for help! But what are the odds against our making contact with a civilized race by coming upon one of its space craft in distress?”
    “What are the odds,” Ketch asked, “against the four of us being alive and coming to a landing here, with our overdrive damaged where it was when there wasn’t a star-disk to be seen?”
    “That’s drama-tape coincidence,” said Howell impatiently. “Such things happen, as we know. But it’s only on the tapes that coincidences happen in succession for the benefit of the actors playing hero.” Then he said, “I’ll make one orbit as nearly over that peninsula as I can make it. We’ll try to see what’s down there. We’ll probably see nothing. If we’re not shot at, I’ll land on the second time around. This is the only liveable planet we can reach. We might as well land at the only place where there are signs of civilization. The beam-message is certainly that!”
    They were very near, now. The green world filled half the sky before the Marintha . It seemed to grow visibly as they looked. The yacht would go on past the sunset line, and be swung around behind it by the planet’s gravitational field, and deep into its shadow. Then, to eyes watching from the peninsula, it would seem to come out of the sunrise and pass overhead. But the sky should be bright enough to make it difficult to follow. Those above, in the yacht, might have a quarter of a minute or a little more in which to examine the beam-signal site and to take photographs.
    Darkness fell. The night-side of the green world was utterly black. Howell moved quickly. Radar told him the yacht’s distance from solidity, There was a magnetic field. There were no moons. Radar again, to check the height. Howell used the yacht’s solar-system drive to correct the altitude. They were far into the planet’s shadow then, with the planet itself a monstrous darkness that seemed to grope blindly for the Marintha .
    They came out abruptly into sunshine, with dawn plucking mountains and islands and continents out of blackness below them. Two hundred miles high. The Marintha went hurtling onward, cameras making overlapping pictures of all that could be photographed at so low an