e stuff too,
creeping there on hands and knees toward the engine room companionway.

Antazzo was talking. "We come now to the matter of instructions," he
said. "You, Farley, will assist me in restoring the ignition system to
normal. You, Carson, will keep to the controls and will lay a course to
Jupiter as soon as the control rocket-tubes will respond. Understand?"

Tom growled reluctant assent from where he was crawling.

Strange, this hypnotic gas! Blaine's mind functioned clearly enough,
yet he was utterly at the mercy of this madman's will--a robot of flesh
and blood. "Jupiter!" he exclaimed. "Why man, it's nearly a half
billion miles from the sun. Not habitable, either."

Antazzo had removed his mask and now smiled a superior smile. "We'll
reach it," he said: "the RX8 is very fast. And it's not the planet
itself we're bound for, but its second satellite. Io, your astronomers
call this body, and it's a world sadly in need of this marvelous
k-metal."

"But--but--"

"Enough!" The hunchback snarled his rebuke in Blaine's face and
turned to Tom. "Come, Farley," he said, as if talking to a child, "we
must get to work."

* * * * *

In a daze of conflicting emotions, Blaine turned to gaze through the
forward port when the two had left the control room. The RX8 was
accelerating rapidly under the steady discharge of gases from the stern
rocket-tube and had already reached the speed of one thousand miles a
second. If one of those tiny asteroids, even one no larger than a
marble, should meet up with them it would crash through the hull plates
as if they were paper. His heart went cold at the thought.

Oddly enough, he found himself _wanting_ to make this trip with the
demoniac Antazzo. It was the effects of the pink gas. Even with the
misshapen guard down there in the engine room the power of his will was
effective. The devil must be an Ionian, he thought. But how in the name
of the sky-lane imps had he reached Earth? How had he wormed his way
into the confidence of the k-metal people? He must have been there
several years, working to this very end.

There was a tinkling crash on the starboard side amidships; a screaming
swish as something slithered along the side and caromed off into the
void. One of those little planetoids. Probably no bigger than a pea,
and luckily they had struck it glancingly. He wiped the sudden
perspiration from his forehead.

Pressure on the direct