s to be
fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law,
should occupy this space.]

On the other side of this tiny sphere of hard-won treasure, his Millen
atomic rocket was sputtering, spurts of hot blue flame jetting from
its exhaust. A simple mechanism, bolted to the first sizable fragment
he had captured, it drove the iron ball through space like a ship.

Through the magnetic soles of his insulated boots, Thad could feel the
vibration of the iron mass, beneath the rocket's regular thrust. The
magazine of uranite fuel capsules was nearly empty, now, he reflected.
He would soon have to turn back toward Mars.

Turn back. But how could he, with so slender a reward for his efforts?
Meteor mining is expensive. There was his bill at Millen and Helion,
Mars, for uranite and supplies. And the unpaid last instalment on his
Osprey suit. How could he outfit himself again, if he returned with no
more metal than this? There were men who averaged a thousand tons of
iron a month. Why couldn't fortune smile on him?

He knew men who had made fabulous strikes, who had captured whole
planetoids of rich metal, and he knew weary, white-haired men who had
braved the perils of vacuum and absolute cold and bullet-swift meteors
for hard years, who still hoped.

But sometime fortune had to smile, and then....

The picture came to him. A tower of white metal, among the low red
hills near Helion. A slim, graceful tower of argent, rising in a
fragrant garden of flowering Martian shrubs, purple and saffron. And a
girl waiting, at the silver door--a trim, slender girl in white, with
blue eyes and hair richly brown.

Thad had seen the white tower many times, on his holiday tramps
through the hills about Helion. He had even dared to ask if it could
be bought, to find that its price was an amount that he might not
amass in many years at his perilous profession. But the girl in white
was yet only a glorious dream....

[Illustration: Gigantic claws seemed to reach out of empty air.]

* * * * *

The strangeness of interplanetary space, and the somber mystery of it,
pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a
tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his
native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below
it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck above the shrunken
sun. Above him, below him, in all directions was vastness