und the table in the dining room of the Logan house,
Roger, Astro, Jeff, Tom, Jane, Billy, Hyram, and Strong.

After Strong had released the Space Cadets from the effects of the
paralo rays, they had searched the _Polaris_ and found the professor
locked in one of the cabins. Placing Vidac and Hardy under arrest and
confining them in the brig of the ship with Winters and Bush, they had
returned to the Logan farm to clear a few of the mysteries surrounding
the nightmare of violence since their landing on Roald.

"When Vidac and Hardy refused to let me go down and make an inspection
of the satellite after the instruments conked out, I knew there was
something fishy," Sykes continued. "Any fool could have seen that
radioactivity would be the only thing to cause an instrument
disturbance like that!"

"Then Vidac and Hardy knew about the uranium?" asked Strong. "We only
discovered it at Space Academy ourselves a little while ago."

"They knew about it all right," asserted Sykes. "Hardy told me so
himself. He got the information from an old prospector who had made
application to come to Roald as a colonist. The space rat had been here
before, as a sailor on a deep spacer that had wandered off course. The
ship was running low on water so the skipper sent him down to the
satellite to see if he could find any. He found the water and the
uranium too. But he clammed up about that, hoping to keep it a secret
until he could go back and claim it. His only chance was to become a
colonist, and when he washed out in the screening, he told Hardy, hoping
to bribe his way. Of course Hardy double-crossed him to get the uranium
himself. That was why you were pulled off the project and sent to Pluto,
Strong. Then he got Vidac to be his aide and everything looked rosy."

"It's still hard to believe that Hardy was behind the whole operation,"
said Astro, shaking his head. "Imagine--the governor of the colony
ratting on his own people."

"It's happened before, unfortunately," commented Strong. "Better men
than Hardy have succumbed to the lure of riches and power."

"You're right, Strong," snapped Sykes. "That's just what happened to
Hardy. While I was his prisoner on the _Polaris_, he kept boasting about
how rich he was going to be--how powerful. When I reminded him of his
past achievements and of his responsibility to the colony, he just
laughed. He said getting the uranium meant more to him than anything in
the world." The little profess