Destination: Saturn

Ajax Calkins was not only the richest young man on Earth, but also the most eccentric. An incurabic romantic, his dream was to find some little world in space of which he could be king—a beloved and benevolent monarch, as in the days of old. It seemed that his dream had come true when, in response to an ad, a man who called himself Anton Smallways came to Ajax on behalf of some asteroid miners, saying that they would like to have a little kingdom of there own and inviting Ajax to be their sovereign. Calkins' only friend at this time was one of the strange spider-beings of Mars, a creature which called itself the Third Least Wuj. The Waj had disgraced itself by Martian spider standards, and the little creature's only hope was to atone by performing some sort of exemplary service; overwhelmingly grateful to the Earthman for giving it an opportunity, it gladly accepted Ajax's offer of the Prime Ministership of Ajaxa. All seemed well until Ajax and the Wuj discovered that Anton Smallways and his fellow so-called miners were not human beings, after all. They were amoeba creatures from Saturn, disguised as men, and the planetoid Ajaxia was not a planetoid, either: it was a vast spaceship constructed by the vanished race of an exploded planet which once had its orbit between Mars and Saturn. The fragments of this planet made up what we call the asteroids.