ut she looked at Soames
instead of the complex instrument. She wore the multi-layer cold-weather
garments issued for Antarctica, but somehow she did not look grotesque
in them. Now her expression was faintly vexed. The third person in the
dome was Captain Estelle Moggs, W. A. C., in charge of Gail's journey
and the public-relations angle generally.

"I just chart the courses of meteors," repeated Soames. "That's all.
There is nothing else to it."

Gail shook her head, watching him.

"Can't you give me a human angle?" she asked. "I'm a woman. I'd like to
be interested."

He shrugged, and she said somehow disconsolately:

"What will knowing the orbits of meteors lead to?"

"Finding out some special meteor-orbits," he said drily, "might lead to
finding out when the Fifth Planet blew itself up.--According to Bode's
Law there ought to be a planet like ours between Mars and Jupiter. If
there was, it blew itself to pieces, or maybe the people on it had an
atomic war."

Gail cocked her head to one side.

"Now, that promises!" she said. "Keep on!"

"There ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, in a certain
orbit," he told her. "There isn't. Instead, there's a lot of debris
floating around. Some is as far out as Jupiter. Some is as far in as
Earth. It's mostly between Mars and Jupiter, though, and it's hunks of
rock and metal of all shapes and sizes. We call the big ones asteroids.
There's no proof so far, but it's respectable to believe that there used
to be a Fifth Planet, and that it blew itself up or was blown up by its
inhabitants. I'm checking meteor-orbits to see if some meteors are
really tiny asteroids."

"Hmmm," said Gail. She displayed one of those surprising, unconnected
bits of information a person in the newspaper business picks up. "Don't
they say that the mountains on the moon were made by asteroids falling
on it?"

"It's at least possible that the moon was smashed up by fragments of the
Fifth Planet," agreed Soames. "In fact, that's a more or less accepted
explanation."

She looked at him expectantly. "I have to think of my readers," insisted
Gail. "It's interesting enough, but how can I make it something they'll
be concerned about? When the moon was smashed, why wasn't Earth?"

"It's assumed that it was," Soames told her. "But on Earth we have
weather, and it happened a long, long time ago, back in the days of
three-toed horses and ganoid fish. Undoubtedly once the Earth was
devastated