“It won’t hurt to try anyhow,” Kalmus proposed. “We might be lucky. I’ve sunk too much in this expedition to turn back now!” “We still intend to pay up our share of the costs, Tony,” Rock assured him. “You needn’t worry about that part of it.” “Finding the ship means as much to you as it does to me—or so you said, Rock,” Kalmus went on stubbornly. “Why are you giving up so easily?” “Of course it means a lot to me, but I’m not going against terrific odds. It would be crazy.” Suddenly Rock thought of something and turned to Sparky Finn. “Sparky, are you absolutely certain you figured out that navigational problem correctly? Yours was the trickiest of all.” “I went over it twice, Rock,” Sparky replied solemnly. “Better look at it again,” Rock proposed. “There’s a possibility we might have botched up our figures somehow. If your calculation is right, we’ll all recheck ours.” Sparky’s math proved to be correct. Then each of the boys went over his own figures again. Halfway through his, Hugh caught an error in his work. “Take me for a numbskull!” he burst out. “Look what I did! No wonder I flunked out in cadet school!” “We are too far out from Venus,” Rock told Kalmus. “We’ve got to go in closer to the planet.” The _Dog Star_ swung into its new orbit. Kalmus became enthusiastic again, and Rock felt that they would meet with success this time, but if they didn’t, there was nothing more to do but admit defeat. It was Johnny Colfax who first spotted an interesting “blip” on the radarscope screen two space days later. Half the eleven-man crew was asleep, but Johnny’s shouts brought everyone running into the main control room. “Look, Rock, I think I’ve found it!” Rock set the telescope in synchronization with the radar set. Then he put his eye to the telescope eyepiece and turned the hairline focus adjustment. Yes, it was really a cigar-shaped craft, man-made, just about the general shape the _Northern Cross_ was supposed to be. It was a streamlined ship built to slide through the atmosphere of Venus. Rock judged it to be a few hundred miles away. “It seems to be the _Northern Cross_,” he announced. “Let me see that thing!” Kalmus blurted and pushed up to the telescope. “There’s our dream ship!” he purred, like a miser over his gold sacks. “I can almost see a dollar sign on that baby!” A few gentle manual corrections later brought the _Dog Star_ alongside the ghost ship. The smaller ship’s crew clustered at the broad port. Only a few thousand yards away, the ship was a giant thing, gray and meteor-scarred from the years that it had wheeled about in space, alternately feeling the torrid heat of the naked sun and the bitter cold when the sun was eclipsed behind the big planet.