ead door was
jammed, but I found a heavy telargeium spanner-wrench on the floor, and
with a strength which frightened me--a strength which could have come
only by some upset condition of gravitation--I soon crashed the door
open. I had no sooner done it, however, than I forgot about the moan
which had fetched me.

* * * * *

What I saw first, hanging on a hook on one wall, was a bunch of keys,
one of which readily opened the lock of my handcuffs. Then there was a
long-barrelled, gleaming atomic gun, undamaged, and a couple of the new
cold-ray flashlights. Free, I caught up one of the flashlights, and
placed back on their hook the keys which had opened the cuffs. Then I
stooped over each corpse, and confirmed my first impression that two of
the dead men were strangers to me, but that I half recognized one.

The vaguely familiar man was clad, under his gray jumper, in the uniform
of a rear admiral of the U. S. W. Upper Zone Patrol Division. He wore a
medal of high honor, the Calypsus medal. I knew that he was Wellington
Forbes, the man who had defeated the planet Calypsus three years before.

Wellington Forbes! And I with him!

I think I may be excused my temporary forgetfulness of the moan which
had brought me to Forbes' death chamber. Uppermost in my mind was the
manner in which I had been brought here. For it was he, approaching me
through the medium of letters and messengers, who had begged, implored
me to help him against Orcon, the eccentric planet of my own discovery,
the planet which belonged to a solar system at the other end of the
Universe from ours. Because of my knowledge of Orcon, with its bubbling
seas, its brooding nightmares, and lastly, its queer conduct toward
Earth, he had wanted to take me away from my telescopes to fight. And I
had refused.

Now I understood how I came to be here.

I knew that this dead man had kidnapped me after drugging me with one of
the new amnesiacs. Yorildiside, I reckoned it. And just because I knew
that Admiral Forbes had seized me by force, I knew almost to a certainty
that I was shipwrecked on that very Orcon which I had discovered two
years before.

* * * * *

I was enraged at this high-handed treatment. For if danger was indeed
threatening Earth from Orcon, my place of all places was at my
telescopes. I could do with them, for the civilizations about me, what
no one else could