ften the negro found him abstractedly smoothing his bangs of
hair, pacing the length of the control cabin, glancing, plainly worried,
at the visi-screen. What special thing was wrong? Friday wondered again
and again--and then, in a flash, he knew.

"Why--how we goin' to _see_ Dr. Ku?" he burst out. "Didn't that Judd say
somethin'----"

The Hawk nodded. "That's just the problem, Eclipse. For you'll remember
Judd said that Ku Sui 'comes out of darkness, out of empty space.' That
might mean invisibility or the Fourth Dimension--and God help us if he's
solved the problem of dimensional traveling. I don't know--but it's
something I can't well prepare against." He fell to musing again,
utterly lost in thought.

* * * * *

A day and a half later found Friday genuinely worried--an unusual state
for the always cheerful black. The laugh wrinkles of his face were
re-twisted into lines of anxiety which gave his face a most solemn and
lugubrious expression. From time to time he grasped the butt of his
ray-gun with a grip that would have pulped an orange; occasionally his
rolling brown eyes sought the gray ones of the Hawk, only to return as
by a magnet to the visi-screen, whose five adjoining squares mirrored
the whole sweep of space around them.

Jupiter now filled one side of the forward observation window. It was a
vast, red-belted disk, an eye-thrilling spectacle at their distance,
roughly a million miles. Against it were poised two small pale globes,
the larger of which was Satellite III. Several hours before, when they
had been closer to the satellite, Carse had scrutinized it through the
electelscope and made out above its surface a silver dot which was a
space-ship. It was bound inward toward Port o' Porno, and might well
have been one of Ku Sui's. But the _Scorpion_, slowing down for her
rendezvous, had attracted no attention and had passed undisturbed.

Now she hung motionless--that is, motionless with respect to the sun.
Only the whisper of the air-renewing machinery disturbed the tension in
her control cabin where the three men stood waiting, glancing back and
forth from the visi-screen to the Earth clock and its calendar
attachment. The date the clock showed was 24 January, the time, 10:21 P.
M. Dr. Ku Sui was one minute late.

Sako, the captive, was sullen and restless, and made furtive glances at
the Hawk, who stood detached, arms hanging carelessly at his sides, gray
e