This is the second in the Black Star series. JOHN W. CAMPBELL first started writing in 1930 when his first short story, When the Atoms Failed, was accepted by a science-fiction magazine. At that time he was twenty years old and still a student at college. As the title of the story indicates, he was even at that time occupied with the significance of atomic energy and nuclear physics. For the next seven years, Campbell, bolstered by a scientific background that ran from childhood experiments, to