s of a tool shop on the ancient yacht
and some antique coils and condensers and such. He became filled with
zest. He almost forgot that he was the skipper of an elderly craft which
should have been scrapped before he was born.

But even he grew hungry, and he realized that nobody offered him food.
He went indignantly into the yacht's central saloon and found his seven
crew-members snoring stertorously, sprawled in stray places here and
there.

He woke them with great sternness. He set them furiously to work on that
housekeeping--including meals--which can be neglected in a feudal castle
because strong outside winds blow smells away and dry up smelly objects,
but which must be practiced in a spaceship.

He went back to work. Suddenly he stopped and meditated afresh, and
ceased his actual labor to draw a diagram which he regarded with great
affection. He returned to his adaptation of the Lawlor drive to the
production of ball lightning.

It was possible to wind coils. A certain percentage of the old
condensers held a charge. He tapped the drive-unit for brazing current,
and the drill-press became a die-stamping device for small parts. He
built up the elements of a vacuum tube such as is normally found only in
a landing grid control room. He set up a vacuum-valve arrangement in the
base of a large glass jar. He put that jar in the boat's air lock, bled
the air to emptiness, and flashed the tube's quaint elements. He brought
it back and went out of overdrive while he hooked the entire new
assembly into the drive-circuit, with cut-outs and switches to be
operated from the yacht's instrument board.

Finished, he examined the stars. The nearby suns were totally strange in
their arrangement. But the Coalsack area was a space-mark good for half
a sector of the galaxy. There was a condensation in the Nearer Rim for a
second bearing. And a certain calcium cloud with a star-cluster behind
it was as good as a highway sign for locating one's self.

He lined up the yacht again and went into overdrive once more. Two days
later he came out, again surveyed the cosmos, again went into overdrive,
again came out, once more made a hop in faster-than-light travel--and he
was in the solar system of which Walden was the ornament and pride.

He used the telescope and contemplated Walden on its screen. The space
yacht moved briskly toward it. His seven Darthian crewmen, aware of
coming action, dolefully sharpened their two-foot knives. The