Writer: Gardner Fox

Penciller: Sid Greene

Inker: Sid Greene

Synopsis: In the year 2160, a two-hundred-year-old space radio telescope picks up a message from the planet Kalmoral, fourth planet in the Sirius system, saying that it is about to be destroyed and requesting help. The Earth scientists realize that the message is nine years old and decide to offer a reward to anyone who can find out what had happened there nine years earlier. Three who take up that challenge are Rick Purvis, Karel Sorensen and Homer Glint, and after each searches by himself or herself, they rejoin each other and declare to each other that they have the answer. Rick starts by telling the others that he had found the device which sent the message to Earth in the ruins of a city that had been destroyed thousands of years earlier. He comes to the conclusion that Kalmoral had been invaded by hostile aliens thousands of years earlier, and that the machine sending the message had been transmitting it ever since then. Karel then tells him that he must be wrong, as she had discovered a spiral ramp at the top of which things disapppeared, leading her to conclude that the Sirians had teleported themselves away from their planet due to the danger. Homer then tells them that they are both wrong, as he had discovered an underground chamber containing the bodies of thousands of people, presumably in suspended animation to protect them from harm of an unknown sort, As the three of them argue, a spaceship approaches and attacks them. They fire on it with their guns, and it disintegrates over the spiral ramp. Suddenly, an old man approaches the trio and explains that he saw and heard everything that had gone on through telepathy, and it wasn't they who destroyed the spaceship, and that they were all wrong about what had occurred. The old man explains that hundreds of years ago, an alien race called the Sorn discovered and attacked Kalmoral, destroying most of their off-world colonies and cities. To stop the Sorn, they invented the spiral ramp, which would send anything at its top to another dimension and which would be activated by the combined mental energy of everyone on the planet. They then set up the ancient message-sender to send out a distress call to lure the Sorn into the trap and they laid themselves down in the underground chambers to concentrate their mental energy at the ramp. The spaceship that appeared was a Sorn ship, and the Sirians used their mental energy to destroy it through the ramp at the same time the three Earthlings blasted it with their guns. The Sirian then makes them vow to keep the secret of Kalmoral, and they return to Earth in apparent failure.

Notes: The three are referred to on the splash page of this story as "Rovers of the Starways," although they are not yet called the Star Rovers at all.

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