aks by the Sun, there came a yell. Distortion had been
detected.

Once on it, they swung the ship outward into space again and moved along
further over the sunlit side. Burl stared into the telescopic viewers as
they probed the surface.

He saw an ugly and terrifying world. The planet, which had a diameter of
only 3,100 miles, compared to Earth's 7,900, was virtually without an
atmosphere. Its surface was baked hard, brilliantly white, covered with
long, deep cracks that cut hundreds of miles into the shriveled and
burned surface. There were areas of dark mountain ranges, bare and
jagged, whose metallic surfaces imparted a darker shade to the pervading
glare. And there were patches here and there on the surface that gleamed
balefully--probably spots of molten material.

Haines, standing next to him, was muttering, "It can't be too far in, it
can't. How could they build it?"

Then Burl found what they were looking for.

A huge canyon tore raggedly across a plain. There was a jumble of
mountains, a chain edging in from the twilight zone. And in a corner,
about two hundred miles out into the hot side, at a narrow ledge where
the mountains came down and the canyon came together, there was a
circular structure.

They could see, as soon as the telescopic sight had been adjusted, that
it was a large station. It was encircled by a featureless wall. It had
no roof. Rising on masts above it was a whole forest of gleaming discs
pointing at the Sun low in the sky.

On the tops of the mountain peaks, a half mile from the station, was
another series of masts. These were aimed away from the Sun into the
dark airless sky and toward the other planets.

"The accumulators and the transmitters," said Burl. "We'll have to get
them both."

"Getting the transmitters will be easy," said Haines. "After we shut off
the station, we'll just bomb the mountain masts out of action."

Burl choked. "Why, it never occurred to me, but why can't we bomb the
station from the air? One atomic bomb should finish it off." He almost
added, And you wouldn't have needed me after all, but squashed the
thought. He wouldn't have given up coming along for anything, he now
realized.

"There's a distortion, as there was at the Andes station, that would
make it hard to hit. But I imagine we could do it if we tried hard
enough. But that isn't what we want at first. It's important, very
important, that we get pictures and details of this station from inside.