ng flat!
Come on!"

There was a mock yell of anger from the _Arcturus_ unit and the two
teams raced back to their starting positions. In the remaining minutes
of play, the cadets played hard and rough. First one team would score
and then the other. A sizable crowd of cadets had gathered to watch the
game and cheered lustily as the players tore up and down the field.
Finally, when both teams were nearly exhausted, the game was over and
the score was eight to seven in favor of the _Polaris_ unit. Roger had
made the final point after Tony Richards had left the game with a badly
bruised hip. A substitute called in from the bystanders, an Earthworm
cadet, had eagerly joined the _Arcturus_ team for the last minutes of
play but had been hopelessly outclassed by the teamwork of the _Polaris_
unit.

Promising a return match soon, Roger, Tom, and Astro hurried to their
lockers, showered, and dressed in their senior cadet uniforms of vivid
blue, then raced to the nearest slidewalk to head toward the main group
of buildings that made up Space Academy.

Whisked along on the moving belt of plastic that formed the principle
method of transportation in and around the Academy grounds, Tom turned
to his unit mates. "What do you think it'll be?" he asked.

"You mean the assignment?" asked Roger, answering his own question in
the next breath. "I don't know. But anything to get out of here. I've
been on Earth so long that I'm getting gravity-itis!"

Tom smiled. "It'll sure be nice to get up in the wide, high, and deep
again," he said, glancing up at the cloudless sky.

"Say it again, spaceman," breathed Astro. "One more lesson on the
differential potential between chemical-burning rocket fuels and
reactant energy and I'll blast off without a spaceship!"

Roger and Tom laughed. They both sympathized with the big cadet's
inability to cope with the theory of atomic energy and fuel conservation
in spaceships. In charge of the power deck on the _Polaris_, Astro
earlier had gained firsthand experience in commercial rocket ships as an
able spaceman and later had been accepted in the Academy for cadet
training. The son of colonists on Venus, the misty planet, his formal
education was limited, and though he had no equal while on the power
deck of a rocket ship, in theory and classroom study he had to depend on
Roger and Tom to help him get passing grades.

The slidewalk moved smoothly and easily toward the gleaming Tower of
Galileo, the la