scover us."

The pirate leader had added, "The moon-jewels I've given you will more
than pay for a small cruiser, if you can buy one at Mars. If you can't
buy one, get one any way you can--but get back here quickly!"

Well, Kenniston thought grimly, he had got a cruiser in the only way
he could. Down in its hold were the berylloy plates and spare
rocket-tubes and new cyclotrons he had had loaded aboard at Syrtis.

But he was also bringing back to Vesta with him a bunch of
thrill-seeking, rich, young people who believed they were going on a
romantic treasure-hunt. What would they think of him when they
discovered how he had betrayed them?

* * * * *

"That's Vesta, isn't it?" spoke a girl's eager voice behind him,
interrupting his dark thoughts.

Kenniston turned quickly. It was Gloria Loring, boyish in silken
space-slacks, her hands thrust into the pockets.

There was a naive eagerness in her clear, lovely face as she looked
toward the distant asteroid, that made her look more like an excited
small girl than like the bored, jewelled heiress of that night at
Syrtis.

"Yes, that's the World with a Thousand Moons," Kenniston nodded.
"We'll reach it by tomorrow. I've just been up on the bridge, telling
your Captain Walls the safest route through the meteor swarms."

Her dark eyes studied him curiously. "You've been out here on the
frontier a long time, haven't you?"

"Twelve years," he told her. "That's a long time in the outer planets.
Most space-men don't last that long out here--wrecks, accidents or
gravitation-paralysis gets them."

"Gravitation-paralysis?" she repeated. "I've heard of that as a
terrible danger to space-travelers. But I don't really know what it
is."

"It's the most dreaded danger of all out here," Kenniston answered. "A
paralysis that hits you when you change from very weak to very strong
gravities or vice versa, too often. It locks all your muscles rigid by
numbing the motor-nerves."

Gloria shivered. "That sounds ghastly."

"It is," Kenniston said somberly. "I've seen scores of my friends
stricken down by it, in the years I've sailed the outer System."

"I didn't know you'd been a space-sailor all that time," the heiress
said wonderingly. "I thought you said you were a meteor-miner."

Kenniston woke up to the fact that he had made a bad slip. He hastily
covered up. "You have to be a good bit of a space-sailor to be a
meteor-miner, Miss Loring. You h