After the memory of the H-bomb's powers had been finally absorbed, the crew's activities began to indicate that the ship was coming into the crucial phase of its journey. Haines and Boulton were going over the list of military supplies with sharp, calculating eyes and slight grins at the thought of retribution to come. Ferrati was overhauling the rocket planes and land traveling devices, making them shipshape. Russell Clyde and Burl surveyed the sky, anxious to be the first to spot what they hoped would be the limping body of the battered and fleeing dumbbell ship, a little atingle at the hope of spotting another such ship--feeling now almost like the hunting dog that has finally spotted the fox. Lockhart himself reflected this mood of growing excitement. He prowled the ship, examining the mighty purring engines, querying Caton, Shea and Detmar as to how it could better its performance, how fast it could be made to shift speed and directions. He studied the orbits and locations of the remaining planets. "Uranus is not too far off our path to Pluto," he announced one day. "We'll make it in time to wipe out their plant there. But Neptune, whose orbit is between those of Uranus and Pluto, is away off our track, a third of the way around the Sun. We're going to skip it, hit directly for Pluto and their main base--the end of their line. I don't want to give them too much time to make repairs or to get any reinforcements. I think they're limited in numbers--and we ought to slam them while they still are." There was no dissent at this. And as the days rolled past, the men of the _Magellan_ began to chafe in their repressed desire to finish the matter. At last Uranus came into sight--a large globe, very much like Saturn and Jupiter in that it was of low density and great dimensions. Roughly, sixty-four times the size of Earth, its density was barely above that of water and it probably had no solid surface to speak of. An inhospitable mass of unbreathable gases, at temperatures fantastically lower than the freezing point of water. As they drew close to the planet, they could see that it also was banded, pale green bands alternating with lighter ones--indicating that some sections of its atmospheric belt moved faster than others. It had five moons which rotated in the opposite direction from those of any other satellite system. It was on the farthest moon, Oberon, a sphere six hundred miles in diameter, that the Sun-tap station revealed itself. They swung down to observe it and to place their bomb. Not an H-bomb though--they recognized that they had erred in thinking they needed such a powerful explosive. Oberon was without an atmosphere, a rocky world with streaks of frozen gases, and here and there the sheen of a lake of ice--ice that would never melt--that on this world would be a permanent, hard-as-metal material. There was, nonetheless, something about the surface that seemed to bother Russ.