After the second slide, Knucklebone switched his chair around so that his back was to the screen. The girls made him feel too sentimental. The blue skies and golden beaches made him homesick. * * * * * On the fifth day Knucklebone Smith was fiddling with a power switch and blew out a safety fuse. It required some three hours for Professor Salvor-Jones to repair it, but he was glad for the diversion. On the eighth day Smith was pottering in the pile room with an electric torch, making himself a wire bookrack. A lubrication reservoir caught on fire and a minor generator was ruined. On the eleventh day he dropped a hammer from the fidley of the power room to the floor, a hundred feet below. A gas line was smashed. Salvor-Jones put on a gas mask and went down to fix it. It took quite a long while. On the fourteenth day, without the slightest pretext, Salvor-Jones called Knucklebone Smith a meddling fool. Smith hit him once and that was that. They didn't speak to each other for four days. The meteor storm came only three days before their exile was to end. On Pluto, where the frozen atmosphere lies inert on the surface, there was nothing to stop the rain of debris from space. It sounded like sporadic hail on the tough metal hull of the beacon, and their scopes showed the mass to be more than a million miles in width, streaming in from the direction of Orion. Salvor-Jones was worried. There was a tiny blip in the lower corner of the solar coordinate on the radar screen; a blip that occulted with alternating brightness and dimness, in a pattern of unnatural regularity. A ship! Her radio came in an hour later. She announced her name, _Luna Star_, and destination, Alpha Centauri. The hail of stones from space was getting worse. The beacon was built to stand such stress, but a starship, meeting them head on--! It was a dangerous situation. Within the Pluto Lamp a hundred relays clicked and buzzed. Automatic switches closed. The power pack, deep in the body of the beacon hummed with sudden power. Even Knucklebone Smith seemed slightly interested. But nothing happened. The ship's signal came in loud and clear once more. "This is _Luna Star_. Come in, robot station Pluto Lamp. Come in Pluto Lamp." Salvor-Jones sprang for the manual switch and flicked it on. "_Luna Star_," he screamed, "Do you read me? This is Pluto Lamp. Do you read me?" "This is _Luna Star_. We understand the robot station is now in operation, but manned. Come in if you are there." "_Luna Star_, do you read me?" They waited a long, tense minute. There was no answer. "We're not getting through," Salvor-Jones said. Knucklebone cleared his throat. "There's a red light on over at the emergency panel. Would that have anything to do with it?" "You imbecile!" Salvor-Jones said, "Why didn't you say so. It's the antenna. I knew it. I knew there'd be trouble with the antenna! A meteorite must have damaged it."