"Luna--" Weeks was plainly doubtful. "No. Not after that warn-off. Terra!" For a second or two the other three stared at Rip agape. The audacity and danger of what he suggested was a little stunning. Since men had taken regularly to space no ship had made a direct landing on their home planet--all had passed through the quarantine on Luna. It was not only risky--it was so unheard of that for some minutes they did not understand him. "We try to set down at Terraport," Dane found his tongue first, "and they flame us out--" Rip was smiling. "The trouble with you," he addressed them all, "is that you think of earth only in terms of Terraport--" "Well, there _is_ the Patrol field at Stella," Weeks agreed doubtfully. "But we'd be right in the middle of trouble there--" "Did we have a regular port on Sargol--on Limbo--on fifty others I can name out of our log?" Rip wanted to know. Ali voiced a new objection. "So--we have the luck of Jones and we set down somewhere out of sight. Then what do we do?" "We seal ship until we find the pest--then we bring in a Medic and get to the bottom of the whole thing," Rip's confidence was contagious. Dane almost believed that it _could_ be done that way. "Did you ever think," Ali cut in, "what would happen if we were wrong--if the Queen really is a plague carrier?" "I said--we seal the ship--tight," countered Shannon. "And when we earth it'll be where we won't have visitors to infect--" "And that is where?" Ali, who knew the deserts of Mars better than he did the greener planet from which his stock had sprung, pursued the question. "Right in the middle of the Big Burn!" Dane, Terra born and bred, realized first what Rip was planning and what it meant. Sealed off was right--the Queen would be amply protected from investigation. Whether her crew would survive was another matter--whether she could even make a landing there was also to be considered. The Big Burn was the horrible scar left by the last of the Atomic Wars--a section of radiation poisoned land comprising hundreds of square miles--land which generations had never dared to penetrate. Originally the survivors of that war had shunned the whole continent which it disfigured. It had been close to two centuries before men had gone into the still wholesome land laying to the far west and the south. And through the years, the avoidance of the Big Burn had become part of their racial instinct as they shrank from it. It was a symbol of something no Terran wanted to remember. But Ali now had only one question to ask. "Can we do it?" "We'll never know until we try," was Rip's reply. "The Patrol'll be watching--" that was Weeks. With his Venusian background he had less respect for the dangers of the Big Burn than he did for the forces of Law and order which ranged the star lanes.