Jak agreed. "I wouldn't go out there for a million credits." He shuddered as he looked out the port while the others crowded about to view that forbidding scene. "Maybe we should, but I sure wouldn't get any fun out of it." "Doubt if our suits would be able to keep us warm, even with the heaters at max." "No," their mother said sharply, although they could detect the relief in her voice that they had already made the decision. "This is one time I would have set my foot down, and not allowed it. This place gives me the creeps." While Jon was making up the tape, Jak carried a signal-sender into the lock and placed it beneath those "distant hands." Jon came in and installed the tape, then started the mechanism running. They returned to the control room, and Jak, whistling unmelodiously between his teeth, operated the controls that opened the outer door, then used the lifting servo-mechanism to set the signal-sender outside on the icy ground. When the outer door was closed, he nodded to Jon and the latter lifted the ship again. "I'm going up a couple of miles, then circle about to look for deposits of that fuel metal. Meanwhile, as we go we can get the rest of our dope, and then scoot out of here." Jak again took his place at the recorders, while his mother was at the cameras. Jon set the ship into a quartering circle, and when he had located the direction in which the analyzer showed the strongest indications of the enigmatic metal, swung into that course. They had gone less than five hundred miles when they noticed a reddish glow in the distance. As they came closer, they saw that ahead and below was a terrific, whirling mass of colored gas. "Wow, look at that storm!" Jak yelled. But he could not help adding, "Did you ever see anything more beautiful?" "Better get well above it, hadn't you?" Mrs. Carver asked anxiously. "It looks dangerous." "I'm sure not going through it." Jon was already lifting the ship. "But 'Annie' says the stuffs right close." At five miles high he leveled off and put the ship into a narrowing spiral. From that vantage point they could see that the storm was a purely localized affair, perhaps some twenty miles in diameter. "Wonder what makes those colors?" Jak called from the telescopic-visiplate into which he was staring. "Suppose it could be a volcano?" "Could there be volcanic action on so cold a planet?" their mother asked in astonishment. "I don't see how there could be," Jak answered slowly, "but that certainly looks like flames of some sort down there." "Maybe the experts from Terra can figure it out from our color pictures," Mrs. Carver said. "I'm taking a lot of extra ones, with the variable focus lens." "That new metal's down there, though, whatever it is. Since those other people mined it, our miners'll figure out how to get it, too, I'll bet."