Chapter 1
_ The sky was black, with myriads of stars. The ground was white. But it was not really ground at all, it was ice that covered everything--twenty miles north to the Barrier, and southward to the Pole itself, past towering mountains and howling emptiness and cold beyond imagining.
The base was almost buried in snow. Off to one side of the main building a faint yellowish glow was the plastic dome of the meteor-watch radar instrument. Inside Brad Soames displayed his special equipment to a girl reporter flown down to the Antarctic to do human-interest articles for not-too-much-interested women readers.
[Illustration: The children huddled together to protect themselves and their ship from the inquisitive strangers.]
All was quiet. This seemed the most unlikely of all possible places for anything of importance to happen.
There was one man awake, on stand-by watch. A radio glowed beside him--a short-wave unit, tuned to the frequency used by all the bases of all the n

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