Navigator Bloss was at the controls, with Captain Fritz Elber and Flight Engineer Darrow Riggs sitting at their stations just behind him. Every one was strangely tense. A soft throb of gently insistent energy seemed to permeate the ship, although all was peculiarly still at this moment.

The left panel, showing us a rear view from the ship, was half filled with the ruddy sphere of Mars, while dead ahead the fearful black of space was weirdly alive with the grayish dots of many hundred planetoids. I gasped in startled realization that we had come such a great way in so short a time. But then, of course, the Typhoon was not taking the usual, parabolic course from Mars to Io. We were blasting straight into the dreaded area of the asteroids. Our commission was to discover, if possible, a reasonably safe lane through the asteroids, in order to shorten the present long and expensive course necessitated because of the millions of meteoric shoals and almost invisible rocks which hurtled through this belt with the speed of a bullet.