and in spite of the powerful heaters of their suits, they felt a touch
of frightful cold. The stranger turned a dial, and the two wanderers
from Earth were instantly in full mental communication with Barkovis,
the commander of a space-ship of Titan, the sixth satellite of Saturn!

"Well, I'll be ... say, what is this, anyway?" Steve exclaimed
involuntarily, and Nadia smiled as Barkovis answered with a thought,
clearer than any spoken words.

"It is a thought-exchanger. I do not know its fundamental mechanism,
since we did not invent it and since I have had little time to study
it. The apparatus, practically as you see it here, was discovered but a
short time ago, in a small, rocket-propelled space-ship which we found
some distance outside of the orbit of Jupiter. Its source of power had
been destroyed by the cold of outer space, but re-powering it was, of
course, a small matter. The crew of the vessel were all dead. They
were, however, of human stock, and of a type adapted for life upon
a satellite. I deduce, from your compact structure, your enormous
atmospheric pressure, and your, to us, unbelievably high body
temperature, that you must be planet-dwellers. I suppose that you
are natives of Jupiter?"

"Not quite." Stevens had in a measure recovered from his stunned
surprise. "We are from Tellus, the third planet," and he revealed
rapidly the events leading up to their present situation, concluding:
"The people in the other sphere were, we believe, natives of Jupiter or
of one of the satellites. We know nothing of them, since we could not
look through their screens. You rescued us from them; do you not know
them?"

"No. Our visirays also were stopped by their screens of force--screens
entirely foreign to our science. This is the first time that any
vessel from our Saturnian system has ever succeeded in reaching the
neighborhood of Jupiter. We came in peace, but they attacked us at sight
and we were obliged to destroy them. Now we must hurry back to Titan,
for two reasons. First, because we are already at the extreme limit
of our power range and Jupiter is getting further and further away
from Saturn. Second because our mirrors, which we had thought perfect
reflectors of all frequencies possible of generation, are not perfect.
Enough of those forces came through the mirrors to volatilize half our
crew, and in a few minutes more none of us would have been left alive.
Why, in some places our very atmosphere became alm