When you have an engine with no fuel, and fuel without an engine, and a life-and-death deadline to meet, you have a problem indeed. Unless you are a stubborn Dutchman--and Jan Van Artevelde was the stubbornest Dutchman on Venus.
The trials of a patent lawyer are usually highly technical tribulations--and among the greatest is the fact that Inventors are only slightly less predictable than their Inventions!
Lenox, the Earl of Redgrave, has made the greatest scientific discovery in the history of the world: a flying ship with the power to break free of Earth's gravity and take to the stars. But before he uses it to expand humanity's understanding of the universe, he has some personal business to attend to-namely, wooing an old flame.
MARS Earth's first colony in Space. Men killed for the coveted ticket that allowed them to go there. And, once there, the killing went on... MARS Ralph Graham's goal since boyhood--and he was Mars-bound with authority that put the whole planet in his pocket--if he could live long enough to assert it! MARS source of incalculable wealth for humanity--and deadly danger for those who tried to get it!
Neal ("Storm") Cloud, nucleonic genius, set out in his spaceship *Vortex Blaster* to track and destroy the vortices. What he finds extends far beyond any threat of nature.