o pitiably little of natural science. We were
hopelessly helpless against an attacking science."

"I promise you, Afthen, that if Earth survives, Ortol shall survive, for
we have given you all the weapons we know of and we will give your
people all the weapons we shall learn of." Morey spoke from the doorway.
Arcot was directly behind him.

They talked for a short while, then Wade retired for some needed sleep,
while Morey and Arcot started further work on the time fields.

Hour after hour the ship sped on through the dark of space, weirdly
distorted, glowing spots of light before them, wheeling suns that moved
and flashed as their awesome speed whirled them on.

They had to move slower soon, as the changing stars showed them near the
space-marks of certain locating suns. Finally, still moving close to
fifteen thousand miles per second, they saw the sun they knew was sun
3769-37,478,-326,894, twice as large as Sol, two and a half times as
massive and twenty-six times as brilliant.

Thirteen major planets they counted as they searched the system with
their powerful telectroscope, the outermost more than ten billion miles
from the parent sun, while planet six, the one indicated by the world
number, was at a distance of five hundred million miles, nearly as far
from the sun as Jupiter is from ours, yet the giant sun, giving more
than twenty-five times as much heat and light in the blue-white range,
heated the planet to approximately the same temperature Earth enjoys.
Spectroscopy showed that the atmosphere was well supplied with oxygen,
and so the inhabitants were evidently oxygen-breathing men, unlike those
of the Negrian people who live in an atmosphere of hydrogen.

Arcot threw the ship toward the planet, and as it loomed swiftly larger,
he shut off the space-control, and set the coils for full charge, while
the ship entered the planet's atmosphere in a screaming dive, still at a
speed of better than a hundred miles a second. But this speed was
quickly damped as the ship shot high over broad oceans to the dull green
of land ahead in the daylit zone. Observations made from various
distances by means of the space-control, thus going back in time, show
that the planet had a day of approximately forty hours, the diameter was
nearly nine thousand miles, which would probably mean an inconveniently
high gravity for the terrestrians and a distressingly high gravity for
the Ortolians, used to their world even smaller than E