Jarvis stretched and fingered the raw and peeling tip of his
frost-bitten nose. He sighed again contentedly.

"Well," exploded Harrison abruptly, "are we going to hear what happened?
You set out all shipshape in an auxiliary rocket, we don't get a peep
for ten days, and finally Putz here picks you out of a lunatic ant-heap
with a freak ostrich as your pal! Spill it, man!"

"Speel?" queried Leroy perplexedly. "Speel what?"

"He means '_spiel_'," explained Putz soberly. "It iss to tell."

Jarvis met Harrison's amused glance without the shadow of a smile.
"That's right, Karl," he said in grave agreement with Putz. "_Ich spiel
es!_" He grunted comfortably and began.

"According to orders," he said, "I watched Karl here take off toward the
North, and then I got into my flying sweat-box and headed South. You'll
remember, Cap--we had orders not to land, but just scout about for
points of interest. I set the two cameras clicking and buzzed along,
riding pretty high--about two thousand feet--for a couple of reasons.
First, it gave the cameras a greater field, and second, the under-jets
travel so far in this half-vacuum they call air here that they stir up
dust if you move low."

"We know all that from Putz," grunted Harrison. "I wish you'd saved the
films, though. They'd have paid the cost of this junket; remember how
the public mobbed the first moon pictures?"

"The films are safe," retorted Jarvis. "Well," he resumed, "as I said, I
buzzed along at a pretty good clip; just as we figured, the wings
haven't much lift in this air at less than a hundred miles per hour, and
even then I had to use the under-jets.

"So, with the speed and the altitude and the blurring caused by the
under-jets, the seeing wasn't any too good. I could see enough, though,
to distinguish that what I sailed over was just more of this grey plain
that we'd been examining the whole week since our landing--same blobby
growths and the same eternal carpet of crawling little plant-animals, or
biopods, as Leroy calls them. So I sailed along, calling back my
position every hour as instructed, and not knowing whether you heard
me."

"I did!" snapped Harrison.

"A hundred and fifty miles south," continued Jarvis imperturbably, "the
surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and
orange-tinted sand. I figured that we were right in our guess, then,
and this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which
would make my orange