"Larry, do you have to be like this?" she pleaded. "I'm wearing your ring, isn't that enough?" Larry stood up. "That's exactly it," he snapped. "You're wearing my ring and the men are going to be watching pretty damn closely when they see you hobnobbing constantly with Carlyle. Oh, don't get me wrong; he's a fine fellow and I think the world of him. But I'm going to ask you not to be with him any more than your work requires!" Ann's fingers tugged at the diamond ring, and suddenly she was handing it to him. "Then here's something for you to mull over, Mr. Larry Wolfe," she said frigidly. "While we're on the trip you can just pretend that you've never met me before. I won't have your jealousy preventing me from doing a good job." Larry let the tiny platinum band drop into his broad palm. His eyes showed the pain that twisted through him, but all he said was: "All right, Ann. But when you want the ring back, you'll have to ask for it." III Brand Haggard's sleek, black _Martian_ did not try to pass them, as Carlyle had prophesied. For three weeks the ship was back there on the starboard quarter, matching them move for move. It was on Larry Wolfe's mind constantly while he stood on the bridge, doing little to ease the tension of his nerves. Strange, unpredictable currents suddenly developed about the ship, and Larry knew that they were only a day or so from the sargasso. Staring through the finder, he made out the diaphonous cloud he had been searching for so long--the sargasso in which they hoped to find millions of dollars in salvage prizes. Magnetic currents, as yet unidentified by scientists, drew space wreckage here from all over the solar system. Ruined space liners, flotsam and jetsam of fifty years of interplanetary traffic, here collected bit by bit. For the salvage crews who made lucky finds, there was wealth; for those who made the tiniest of errors in their dangerous work, there was death. Larry Wolfe's thoughts were on the long-missing Astral as he stood his watch that last night. The _Astral_, lost gold transport from Mars to Earth, had been the dream of salvage men for twenty-five years. Somewhere in the solar system it still drifted about. The chances were good that it had been sucked into one of the many sargasso fields; still better, that this newest field, largest of all, had caught it. In Thaddeus Carlyle's rooms, Ann had been hearing the same story that Larry was dreaming over even now. Carlyle's quiet, powerful words painted romantic highlights over it. The girl found her heart beating faster in anticipation of the days ahead. "But in all this trackless wilderness of--of ether," she frowned, "how can you hope to find anything at all? Let alone the _Astral_--" Carlyle smiled, glanced out the port at the vague gray shadow into which they were heading.