The organicus officer grinned with one corner of his mouth. He pulled down a platinum lever, and a thirty-inch screen above his control board sprang to life. The black of space showed the bumpy planetoid like a ball of cold lava, and seated in the center of the screen, a man in a spacesuit. Captain Pinkham licked his lips. "Okay," he said, "I owe you a shot of rye. You were right." Then he blinked his gray eyes. "My God!" he roared. "What's a human being doing out here in System Ninety?" The outburst, he felt, was quite justified; in fact, he might have gone stark raving crazy with justification. There seemed no possibility that his space armada could have been preceded to this star system by another from Earth. The ancient Martians might have made it this far, but their spacesuits were nothing like those of Terra. So he and Jerry were now staring at a hopeless absurdity. It couldn't be there. Pinkham leaned sideways and bellowed into the intercom. "Get in here! Everybody! On the double!" The crew came running, from the engine rooms, the astrogatium and astrolab, from the sleeping quarters and the mess hall. The ship was gigantic; it took twenty minutes, for the ship's complement to assemble in the captain's control hall. There were fifty-seven men, eighteen officers. They stood in casual formation and gaped at the life-scanner's screen. The spacesuited figure had not moved. Captain Pinkham said, "One question. Which of you gadget-happy jokers gimmicked up the scanner on us? Who did this?" Nobody said anything. Only one man smiled: Lieutenant Joe Silver, a very bright, very ambitious big cub who was on his second extragalactic expedition and obviously had visions of earning his captain's bronze comets within the year. Joe was a rather unpleasant young piece of beef, thought Pink; but he wouldn't pull practical jokes. He was too bloody serious. If he smiled, it was probably because he was enjoying the Captain's evident bewilderment. "Then it isn't a joke," said Pinkham. "Three of you outside repairmen get into your suits and bring _that_ in." He gestured at the silent figure on the motionless little world of the scanner. "Jerry says it's alive. Handle with care." He waved them his dismissal. Some twenty minutes later he watched the screen as the three crewmen descended to the surface of the planetoid, pried loose the double anchor which the unknown Earthman had sunk into the ball's crust to hold him steady on the almost-gravityless world, lifted the bulky figure and leaped upward, like thick but weightless panthers carrying their prey, into the open air-lock. The spacesuited stranger had not moved in the slightest. Yet the scanner, which was never wrong, said that within the armor of the suit was life. Pinkham sat staring at the blanked-out screen, and a queer chill began to crawl up his neck. An old slang phrase came to his mind, and wouldn't leave. How come? How come? _How come?_ CHAPTER II