rris appeared
unconcerned. He stood there calmly smoking his pipe, his keen blue eyes
squinting against the biting wind.

Mason switched on the speaker. Its high-frequency scream rose
deafeningly above us and was torn away in unsteady gusts. He began to
turn its center dial, at first a quarter circle, and then all the way to
the final backstop of the calibration. All that resulted was a
continuation of that mournful ululation like a wail out of eternity.

Mason tried again. With stiff wrists he tuned while perspiration stood
out on his forehead, and the rest of us crowded close.

"It's no use," he said. "This pickup failure proves there isn't a
vestige of animal life on Stragella--on this hemisphere of the planet,
at least."

Navigator Norris took his pipe from his mouth and nodded. His face was
expressionless. There was no indication in the man's voice that he had
suffered another great disappointment, his sixth in less than a year.

"We'll go back now," he said, "and we'll try again. There must be some
planet in this system that's inhabited. But it's going to be hard to
tell the women."

Mason let the surveyor rod down with a crash. I could see the anger and
resentment that was gathering in his eyes. Mason was the youngest of our
party and the leader of the antagonistic group that was slowly but
steadily undermining the authority of the Navigator.

This was our seventh exploratory trip after our sixth landing since
entering the field of the sun Ponthis. Ponthis with its sixteen
equal-sized planets, each with a single satellite. First there had been
Coulora; then in swift succession, Jama, Tenethon, Mokrell, and R-9. And
now Stragella. Strange names of strange worlds, revolving about a
strange star.

It was Navigator Norris who told us the names of these planets and
traced their positions on a chart for us. He alone of our group was
familiar with astrogation and cosmography. He alone had sailed the
spaceways in the days before the automatic pilots were installed and
locked and sealed on every ship.

A handsome man in his fortieth year, he stood six feet three with broad
shoulders and a powerful frame. His eyes were the eyes of a scholar,
dreamy yet alive with depth and penetration. I had never seen him lose
his temper, and he governed our company with an iron hand.

He was not perfect, of course. Like all Earthmen, he had his faults.
Months before he had joined with that famed Martian scientist,
Ganeth-Kla