There was no separate
individual for the female. As is the case with primitive organisms,
they were all bi-sexual, the parent dying in the reproduction of
offspring.

Of necessity I have been forced into digression. But at the time, Snap
and I clung together, whispering, as a group of workers pushed us down
a descending incline. Snap, back there in Greater New York when Molo's
contact light had burst into existence, had fallen, half unconscious.
They picked him up. Molo was going to kill him, but the girls
persuaded him to take Snap with them.

"Anita and Venza pretended never to have seen me before," Snap
whispered to me now. "You take the same line."

"If we get with them."

"We will."

It was weird, this landing upon Wandl. We had left the vessel's
side-port and were descending what seemed a narrow, hundred-foot
landing incline. We were outdoors, and it was night. Shafts of colored
radiance flashed around us. The ship was poised on a disc-like
platform, with skeleton legs. It seemed a hundred feet or more down to
the ground level from where the colored lights were darting up.
Overhead was a cloudless, purple-red sky of blurred, reddish stars. No
doubt the curious atmosphere of Wandl gave the sky and stars this
abnormal look.

Later, what a multiplicity of obscure wonders we were to glimpse upon
Wandl! The slowing rotation of the Earth caused climatic changes
there, volcanic and tidal disturbances, but Wandl rotated and stopped
at will. Undoubtedly she was equipped to withstand the shock. Her
internal fires could not break into eruption; she had very little
fluid surface. And the nature of her atmosphere was such that it was
not easily disturbed into storms. Only if there was laxity in the
handling of the planet's motion would a storm come.

But now, questions pounded at me. Earth, Venus and Mars were to be
towed into interstellar space; all life on our worlds would perish in
the cold of that stellar journey. Yet Wandl had made that journey. Was
her atmosphere inherently such that it did not transmit rays of heat?

Snap and I had been pushed down the incline with half a dozen figures
in advance of us. Without difficulty we could have leapt down that
hundred feet, unaided. Figures were leaping into mid-air from several
pressure-ports of the ship. They did not fall, but floated, drifted
down. I saw one of the insect-like workers drop with motionless
outstretched arms. Others came mounting up, using their arms