The girl clung to him half in terror. Matt could feel her taut young body pressed against him. Slowly the tension melted out of her muscles. _Fool_, he thought, _why didn't I try this two years ago?_ Matt stiffened. Over the crown of Lynn's yellow hair he caught sight of a pale drawn face in the shadows of the ladder well across the deck. It took him a second to recognize Nesbit, the palaeontologist, a young man only a few years out of college. "What is it?" Lynn asked, turning her head. "Oh!" Nesbit glared at the pair silently; then his face disappeared as he withdrew down the ladder. "What the hell's eating him?" asked Matt. Lynn bit her lip. "He must have followed us up. He...." She paused, looking embarrassed. "He asked me to marry him when we reach Earth." "Good Lord," ejaculated Matt. He turned the girl loose. "I wouldn't...." Lynn's arms went around him fiercely and shook him. "Silly. He's just a kid. I tried to let him down easy, but I certainly didn't promise to marry him." A grin spread across Matt's face. His arms tightened. From the corner of his eye, he could see the unwinking green disk of Earth, silent, cold, and unbelievably far away. * * * * * During the next three months, they tore the radio down seven times and rebuilt it with infinite care. They tested every tube and circuit. They might as well have saved their time. Not a single message reached them from Earth. After three months they gave up trying at last and a queer sense of dread took possession of them as the earth slowly expanded. Sparks was a wreck. He spent incredible stretches in the radio shack listening for a signal--any signal--from his dead instruments. The cook went berserk and stabbed one of the engineers. Dr. Gwathmey, the gentle, gray-haired psychologist, picked a fight with Pendergrast, the expedition's gentle, gray-haired anthropologist over the theory that life had resulted from spores drifting to Earth on light tides. The two old men had battled it out in the messroom with their fists. They were all, Matt realized, strained, nervous, edgy.... On the seventh of May the _Argus_ began to drop cautiously down through a blanket of clouds that hid the surface of Earth. Everyone was at the ports, but they were descending on the night side of the planet, and the clouds were like soup. Nothing was to be seen. They were long since through the Heaviside layer, but still no broadcast had reached them. The ether was as silent as it must have been before the discovery of radio. "Hell!" said Matt. "There's nothing to be seen out there." He took his nose away from the port beyond which the wet clouds were roiling in sheets of red, tinted by the flaming jets. "I'm going to wait in the messroom." He stamped off. He had grown thinner and his face was lined. His blue eyes were haggard. The _Argus_ lurched and dropped a dozen feet, hurling him to his knees.