at the ground for a sign of what might have been
stored in the building. The surrounding area revealed no tracks. He
pulled out a thick-bladed pocketknife and stepped to the lock, then
suddenly stopped and grinned.

"Great," he said to himself. "A Solar Guard officer about to break into
private property without a warrant. Fine thing to have known back at the
Academy!"

He turned abruptly and strode back to the scout. Climbing into the
craft, he picked up the audioscriber microphone and recorded a brief
message. Removing the threadlike tape from the machine, he returned to
the house and left it on the spool of the audioscribe-replay machine
near the front door.

A few moments later the eerie silence of the Sharkey plantation was once
again shattered by the hissing roar of jets as the launch took off and
climbed rapidly over the jungle. Air-borne, Connel glanced briefly at a
chart, changed course, and sent the launch hurtling at full speed across
the jungle toward the Sinclair plantation.

* * * * *

"How far do you think we've come?" asked Tom sleepily.

Astro yawned and stretched before answering. "I'd say about fifteen
miles, Tom."

"Seems more like a hundred and fifteen," moaned Roger who was sprawled
on the ground. "I ache all over. Start at the top of my head and work
down, and you won't find one square inch that isn't sore."

Tom grinned. He was tired himself, but the three-day march through the
jungle had been three of the most exciting days in his life. Coming from
a large city where he had to travel two hours by monorail to get to open
green country, the curly-haired cadet found this passage through the
wildest jungle in the solar system new and fascinating. He had seen
flowers of every color in the spectrum, some as large as himself; giant
shrubs with leaves so fine that they looked like spider webs; Venusian
teakwood trees fifty to a hundred feet thick at the base with some
twisted into strange spirals as their trunks, shaded by another larger
tree, sought a clear avenue to the sun. There were bushes that grew
thorns three inches long, hard as steel and thin as needles; jungle
creepers, vines two and three feet thick, twisting around tree trunks
and strangling them. He saw animals too, all double the size of anything
on Earth because of the lighter Venusian gravity; insects the size of
rats, rats the size of dogs, and wild dogs the size of ponies. Up in the
trees, smal