e sling, were bundles; one
large, one small, but sagging with weight. Both were bound tightly in
wrappings of broad leaves.

"We will go now," Herr Kreiss stated: "there is no time to be lost."

"Go? Go where?" Chet's question echoed his utter bewilderment.

"To the ship! Come, savage!"--he motioned to Towahg--"I did not do well
when I made my way alone. You shall lead now."

"He's crazy," Chet told himself half aloud: "his motor's shot and his
controls are jammed! Oh, well; what's the difference? I might as well
spend the time this way as any. I meant to go back to the old ship once
more."

Kreiss' arm still troubled from the wound he had got in the fight, but
Chet could not induce him to share his load.

"_Es ist mein recht_," he grumbled, and added cryptically: "To each man
this only is sure--that he must carry his own cross." And Chet, with a
shrug, let him have his way.

* * * * *

There was little said on the trip. Chet was as silent and
uncommunicative as Kreiss when, for the last time, he paused on the
divide to see the green glint from a distant ship, then plunged with the
others into a forest as unreal as all this experience now seemed.

And at the last, when the red light of late afternoon ensanguined a wild
world, they came to the smoke of Fire Valley, and a thousand fumeroles,
little and big, that emitted their flame and gas. And one, at the lower
end of the valley had built up a great mound of greasy mud from whose
top issued hot billows of green gas. It was here that Kreiss paused and
unslung his pack.

"Take this," he told Chet; and the pilot dragged his reluctant eyes from
the view of the nearby cylinder enveloped in green clouds. The scientist
was handing him the larger of the two packages. It was bulky but light:
Chet took it by a loop in one of the vines.

"Careful!" warned Kreiss. "I have worked on it for a month; you see, my
equipment was not so good. I thought that the time might come when it
would be put to use, only first I must conquer the gas--which I now
prepare to do."

"I don't understand," Chet protested.

"You are a Master Pilot of the World?" questioned Kreiss, and Chet
nodded.

"And the control on your ship was a modification of the new ball-control
mechanism such as is used on the latest of the high-level liners?"

Again Chet nodded.

"Then, if ever you are so fortunate, Herr Bullard, as to see once more
that device on one of those sh