of hours, when and if
anyone shows up, all they'll find is three space cadets fried on the
half shell of a spaceship!"

"Listen, Roger," said Tom, "as soon as we fail to check in, the whole
Mars Solar Guard fleet will be out looking for us. Our last report will
show them we were heading in this direction. It won't take Captain
Strong long to figure out that we might have run out of fuel, and, with
that skid mark in the sand trailing back for twenty miles, all we have
to do is stick with the ship and wait for them to show up!"

"What's that?" asked Astro sharply.

From a distance, the three cadets could hear a low moaning and wailing.
They rushed to the crystal port and looked out on the endless miles of
brown sand, stretching as far as the horizon and meeting the cloudless
blue sky. Shimmering in the heat, the New Sahara desert of Mars was just
beginning to warm up for the day under the bleaching sun. The thin
atmosphere offered little protection against the blazing heat rays.

"Nothing but sand," said Tom. "Maybe something is still hot on the power
deck." He looked at Astro.

"I checked it before I came topside," said Astro. "I've heard that noise
before. It can only mean one thing."

"What's that?" asked Roger.

Astro turned quickly and walked to the opposite side of the littered
control deck. He pushed a pile of junk out of the way for a clear view
of the outside.

"There's your answer," said Astro, pointing at the port.

"By the rings of Saturn, look at that!" cried Tom.

"Yeah," said Roger, "black as the fingernails of a Titan miner!"

"That's a sandstorm," Astro said finally. "It blows as long as a week
and can pile up sand for two hundred feet. Sometimes the velocity
reaches as much as a hundred and sixty miles an hour. Once, in the
south, we got caught in one, and it was so bad we had to blast off. And
it took all the power we had to do it!"

The three cadets stood transfixed as they gazed through the crystal port
at the oncoming storm. The tremendous black cloud rolled toward the
spaceship in huge folds that billowed upward and back in
three-thousand-foot waves. The roar and wail of the wind grew louder,
rising in pitch until it was a shrill scream.

"We'd better get down to the power deck," said Tom, "and take some
oxygen bottles along with us, just in case. Astro, bring the rest of the
Martian water and you grab several of those containers of food, Roger.
We might be holed in for a long time.