The beam of heat that had wrecked the tower, swung downward. It hit the front of the Community Bank, and the latter's windows, with the gold lettering on them, cracked and wilted. Old Arne Reynaud, hunched now behind the stone blocks that flanked the steps, was hit. His whole back was raked by that invisible sword of concentrated heat waves. Flesh and clothing alike was burned away from his spine. But even as this was happening, slender atom-rifles and pistols were brought into play--sobbing and whirring. Ron Leiccsen was among the other marksmen, firing with his pistol from beneath the foliage of the maple sapling, where he had drawn Anna Charles. The swift missiles struck the invader craft. Incandescent spots, bluer and more eye-hurting than the glare of an electric arc, blotched its burnished hull. It sagged in its flight like a mass of wet paper, and plummeted to the street. From the wreck was hurled a big-chested, furry, half-human form, bloodied, and spattered with its own brains, its broken, slender limbs tangled in the wires of a house-yard fence. Ron Leiccsen leaped to where Arne Reynaud lay on the heat-racked bank steps. There was still a flicker of life in his faded blue eyes, glazed with agony. But he was past all help. "Ron," he muttered, as the youth bent over him. "You didn't believe me--anyhow at first.... But I ain't a liar.... I told the truth.... Mars.... That ship there.... Do what I said--please.... It'll lick the Callistans.... You got nerve--cleverness--plenty. A swell space-pilot, too--the others aren't so good.... Bring the freighter to Titan.... Sprinkle the stuff in the hold all over Leiccsenland.... The cargo is--is...." And there old Arne's heart stopped beating. His charred body relaxed in its last sleep. His brain ceased to think. And a vast question-mark seemed to hang over him. While in Leiccsenland, chaos thundered. Fire crackled and roared. Anna Charles was bending close to the old man's body, too, her face a mask of dumb horror. But she had become challenging again, now. "You heard what he said, didn't you, Ron Leiccsen?" she flung at him with a taut, cold softness. "Your idea that we should all leave Titan may be wrong! There's that ship on Mars, which might save our colony! And he--Arne--appointed you to go and bring it here!" * * * * * No one could ever have traced the course of the tumultuous hatred and doubt that seethed in Ron Leiccsen's mind just then. Red hate of the laughing fiends of Callisto! Little, withered Arne Reynaud--murdered! He was a hero--an inspiration! And yet, maybe he was just an old fool with an empty, hair-brained scheme that wouldn't work! Another crackpot--a kind of fanatical inventor, perhaps, who deluded himself into believing in a worthless idea! A ship on Mars, loaded with something. What?