He saw the ship then, but it was no longer a ship. It dawned on him why the Plutonians had never ventured much nearer the sun, and why, after they had known all about him, they had let him go. Receding from him, was a perfect sphere of liquid mercury, once the hard hull of a space ship, covered with a thin layer of water that had once been windows, with small pieces of solid material floating on the surface. It was only a natural law that it should revert to this form when deprived of the sub-temperatures of Pluto. Yes, Marcius Kemble saw it all now, but too late. He remembered a demonstration he had seen when a child. A man had poured mercury into a mold and cooled it to near absolute zero. When withdrawn from the mold, it had been a little bell that gave a clear tone. Why hadn't he thought of it before? The cold bodies of the Plutonians enabled them to handle such metals as he would handle steel! They made their ships and machines of such things as mercury and ice, and perhaps a few materials unknown to man, but all of a low melting point. Why should they do otherwise, when the extreme cold of Pluto made those things as hard as steel? It was even doubtful if they could produce enough heat to melt steel or even glass, or if they could produce a substance able to retain such fires. A hot rage began to boil within him. The Plutonians had known it all along! With their science they could have kept him alive until they had learned how to build a ship that would not melt from the heat of the sun. Now, Marcius Kemble's unretarded speed carried him through the orbit of the earth while it was still many thousands of miles distant. He began to feel the boiling heat of the sun and realized what it would be like when the insulation of his space suit gave way to that awful heat, but he decided that he would never live to suffer it. Better to let the vacuum of space draw his life from him quickly and painlessly. Slowly, he reached up to unscrew his helmet. He gave it a slight tug, then twisted with all his might. The helmet did not budge. For a moment he could not think clearly. Then it came to him. The air pressure within the suit was so great, in relation to the vacuum of space, that it bound the threads together with a friction that he could never hope to overcome! With fear-filled eyes, he watched the hot disk of the sun expand around him as he fell toward it. The system would soon be rid of Marcius Kemble.