“Yes, sir,” Rob said. Seven days sounded like ample time, but the area they had to cover was several square miles. From Dr. Franz’s description of the place, the liquid medium beneath the ice was wide and deep, a veritable ocean. Beneath this solution the ice began again and extended into the core of the small planet. Explanations over, the majority of the crew, about twenty spacemen, climbed into their space gear, Rob and Jim with them. Mr. Brigger and a few key personnel would remain aboard to attend the operational facilities of the ship. The suits were triple-reinforced against the exceeding cold and were electrically heated. The helmets, with inside radio sets, were frost-free types, and the shoes were doubly weighted and spike-soled for navigating over the icy, low-gravity surface. The men descended to the ground on an escalator dropped from the side of the _Centaurus_. Rob had the men spread out, two by two, as safety buddies. He concentrated on the farther corners of the ice field to begin with, intending to bring the searchers closer and closer to the ship each day. As the men began hiking over the glacier, Rob and Jim talked together through their helmet radio sets. “I don’t understand how the water under the ice flows without freezing in this superlow temperature,” Jim remarked. “It can’t be water,” Rob answered. “It’s something else, probably a liquefied gas with an extremely low freezing point. Wherever it is, it must contain all the elements needed to support its strange life forms.” “Let’s start looking too, Jim,” Rob suggested. The first “day” passed without success. Then the second. Night was only a relative term, for Uranus, Titania’s main source of light, was never out of the sky. On the third day, some of the men complained about having to spend ten hours at a time in biting cold weather searching for something they were sure did not even exist. Despite the men’s heavily insulated suits, the ultralow temperature that frosted the suits like mold could not be entirely kept out. Rob sympathized with the men, but there was no other way to do the job. It was on the fifth day that one of the searchers spotted a small thick-bodied shape several feet beneath the ice. The cordon of searchers had closed in more than halfway to the ship by now. “Jim, will you supervise operation of the ice saw?” Rob asked, when they had joined the men who had made the discovery. Jim nodded and left. “Has it moved yet?” Rob asked one of the crewmen, trying to curb the almost overpowering excitement he felt. “No,” one of them replied. “It seems to be dead and embedded in the ice.”