The years passed relentlessly, ticked off—one, two three, four—by the big lone planet Worta as it moved with ponderous sureness around the dying red star. Sometimes, in the first year after they were marooned, the two runaway boys, Carl Wyant and Rex Oberling, crawled from the grottoes, chambers and labyrinthine tunnels which the Wortans had driven deep beneath the planet's crust, and with a chill lonesomeness looked out into the vastness of space where the stars brooded. One of those stars, thi