 How long did Billy-boy and Grannie Annie travel after heat ray attack?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. The Spacemen's was a sanctuary, a rest club where in-coming pilots and crewmen could relax before leaving for another voyage. The rule that no females could pass its portals was strictly enforced. There she stood before a frantically gesticulating desk clerk, leaning on her faded green umbrella. Her annual income totaled into six figures, and her publishers sat back and massaged their digits, watching their earnings mount. If Annabella C. Flowers wrote a novel, and the locale was the desert of Mars, she packed her carpet bag and hopped a liner for Craterville. If she cooked up a feud between two expeditions on Callisto, she went to Callisto. Grannie spilled a few shreds of Martian tobacco onto a paper and deftly rolled herself a cigarette. Grannie Annie hailed a hydrocar. But the place was packed with miners, freight-crew-men—all the tide and wash of humanity that made Swamp City the frontier post it is. On the right were nine visi sets, each with its new improved pantascope panel and switchboard. I will only say that on this stage are nine visi sets, each tuned to one of the nine planets. For every question missed, the sender will receive a check for one thousand planetoles . Questions from Mars, from Earth, from Saturn flowed in the visi sets. Isolated miners on Jupiter, dancers in swank Plutonian cafes strove to stump the experts. Moments later an official hydrocar roared up and a dozen I.P. men rushed out and scattered the crowd. Grannie Annie came out from behind the box office then. She took my arm and led me around a corner and through a doorway under a sign that read THE JET. "Billy-boy, did you see the way that crowd acted?" I nodded. "When it was finished I had planned to take a six months' vacation, but those fool publishers of mine insisted I do a sequel. I went to Venus City, and I spent six weeks in-country. The Alpha rays of this rock are similar to radium in that they consist of streams of material particles projected at high speed. But the character of the Gamma rays has never been completely analyzed. Like those set up by radium, they are electromagnetic pulsations, but they are also a strange combination of Beta or cathode rays with negatively charged electrons. "When any form of life is exposed to these Gamma rays from the Green Flame rock, they produce in the creature's brain a certain lassitude and lack of energy.
 six days
 Until January, when Death In The Atom hit stands  six weeks  Until dark when the arrived at the camp fire  six days