ond Ventura B!"

"I almost expected to hear that," Sessions said.

"It adds up, all right, doesn't it? A foreign substance, a foreign system.
But this substance had been made into a plate. That means the work of
intelligent beings."

"Who took the Astra on that trip?" Sessions asked, his body tense.

"A licensed space explorer named Murchison. Two others went with him but he
returned alone. Claims they fell into a chasm."

"But no explorer has reported life beyond Ventura B," Sessions said, taking
up the thread of thought. He whistled softly. "You must have been busy this
last week."

"Busy is no word for it. It's only three years since anyone has been
allowed to go outside our system. For the purpose of science Interstellar
Flight granted permits to six licensed explorers. All returned with charts
showing only a desolate waste. In our own quiet way we have checked on each
of these six men, including Murchison, in the last week."

"And . . . ?"

"And we discovered something very interesting. The six who returned from
beyond Ventura B were not the same six who went! They are identical in
every facial, bodily, and mental characteristic, identical enough to fool
even the families of the lost explorers. But when we secretly photographed
them with infra-red light we found that their skins contained elements
foreign to our system!"

Ventura A and its sister star were the twin beacons that marked the last
outposts of the Earth System. Past them was only a trackless waste of
inter-stellar space. Ben Sessions knew that the charts he carried were
probably worse than useless, were likely downright traps.

He and Carson had planned the trip. Carson had wanted to send a fighting
fleet but Ben had opposed the idea. Wayne's mistake had led them to the
uncovering of a gigantic hoax, a hoax which could have only a sinister
purpose. Somewhere in the void ahead were sentient beings. To send a fleet
would be to let them know that their existence was suspected.

Sessions let the automatic controls take over while he examined the charts
once more. They showed the constellation which lay directly ahead, the one
after that, and then nothing for hundreds of millions of miles. Those first
two reflected a tiny amount of light from Ventura B and were visible
through telescopes, therefore it would have created suspicion to falsify
their position. Past them, however, the blackness was too intense to
penetrate.

The speed of the rocket