Day after day passed, and even the new and ultra-powerful detector screens of the _Sirius_ remained unresponsive and cold. Day after day the plates before the doubled lookouts and observers remained blank. Power flowed smoothly and unfailingly into the cosmic receptors, and the products of conversion were discharged with equal smoothness and regularity from the forty-five gigantic driving projectors. The tractor beam held its heavy burden easily and the generators functioned perfectly. And finally a planet began to loom up in the stern lookout plates. Verna, the irrepressible, was in the control room of the _Sirius_, quarreling adroitly with Brandon and deftly flirting with Crowninshield. Glancing into the control screen she saw the planet in its end block, then studied the instruments briefly. "We're heading for _Mars_!" she declared with conviction. "I thought it looked that way yesterday, but supposed it must be only apparent--a trick of piloting or something about the orbit. I thought of course you were taking us back home--but you can't _possibly_ get to Tellus on any such course as this!" "Sure not," Brandon replied easily. "Certainly it's Mars. Isn't that where the _Arcturus_ started out for? Whoever said we were going to Tellus? Of course, if any of the passengers want to go right back the IPC will undoubtedly furnish transportation _gratis_. But paste this in your hat, Verna, for future reference--when spacehounds start out to go anywhere they _go_ there, even if they have to spend a year or so on minus time to do it!" Closer and closer they approached the red planet, swinging around in a wide arc in order to make their course coincide exactly with the pilot ray of check station M14, which was now precisely in its scheduled location in space. At the chief pilot's desk in the control room of the _Arcturus_, Breckenridge checked in with the station, then calculated rapidly the instant of their touching the specially-built bumper platforms of spring steel, hemp, and fiber which awaited them upon the Martian dock of the Interplanetary Corporation. Within range of the terminal, he plugged into it, waited until the tiny light flashed its green message of attention, and reported. "IPV _Arcturus_; Breckenridge, Chief Pilot; trip number forty-three twenty-nine. Checking in--four hundred forty-six days, fifteen hours, eleven minutes, thirty-eight and seven-tenths seconds minus!" THE END. Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Amazing Stories July, August and September 1931. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. End of Project Gutenberg's Spacehounds of IPC, by Edward Elmer Smith