“Did we make it?” he asked dully.

Dane, not taking his eyes from that fascinating scene without, answered:  “You brought us down.  But I don’t know where—­”

“Unless our instruments were ’way off, we’re near to the heart of the Burn.”

“Some heart!”

“What does it look like?” Rip sounded too tired to cross the cabin and see for himself.  “Barren as Limbo?”

“Hardly!  Rip, did you ever see a tomato as big as a melon—­At least it looks like a tomato,” Dane halted the spy lens as it focused upon this new phenomena.

“A what?” There was a note of concern in Shannon’s voice.  “What’s the matter with you, Dane?”

“Come and see,” Dane willingly yielded his place to Rip but he did not step out of range of the screen.  Surely that did have the likeness to a good, old fashioned earth-side tomato—­but it was melon size and it hung from a bush which was close to a ten foot tree!

Rip stumbled across to drop into the Com-tech’s place.  But his expression of worry changed to one of simple astonishment as he saw that picture.

“Where are we?”

“You name it,” Dane had had longer to adjust, the excitement of an explorer sighting virgin territory worked in his veins, banishing fatigue.  “It must be the Big Burn!”

“But,” Rip shook his head slowly as if with that gesture to deny the evidence before his eyes, “that country’s all bare rock.  I’ve seen pictures—­”

“Of the outer rim,” Dane corrected, having already solved that problem for himself.  “This must be farther in than any survey ship ever came.  Great Spirit of Outer Space, what has happened here?”

Rip had enough technical training to know how to get part of the answer.  He leaned halfway across the com, and was able to flick down a lever with the very tip of his longest finger.  Instantly the cabin was filled with a clicking so loud as to make an almost continuous drone of sound.

Dane knew that danger signal, he didn’t need Rip’s words to underline it for him.

“That’s what’s happened.  This country is pile ‘hot’ out there!”

Chapter XIV

SPECIAL MISSION

That click, the dial beneath the counter, warned them that they were as cut off from the luxuriance outside as if they were viewing a scene on Mars or Sargol from their present position.  To go beyond the shielding walls of the spacer into that riotous green world would sentence them to death as surely as if the Patrol was without, with a flamer trained on their hatch.  There was no escape from that radiation—­it would be in the air one breathed, strike though one’s skin.  And yet the wilderness flourished and beckoned.

“Mutations—­” Rip mused.  “Space, Tau’d go wild if he could see it!”

And that mention of the Medic brought them back to the problem which had earthed them.  Dane leaned back against the slanting wall of the cabin.