me how to make a golf ball behave. Next to Norman Brandon, I've got
the most vicious hook in captivity--and Norm can't help himself. He's
left-handed, you know, and, being a southpaw, he's naturally wild. He
slices all his woods and hooks all his irons. I'm consistent, anyway--I
hook everything, even my putts."

"It's a bargain! What do you shoot?"

"Pretty dubby. Usually in the middle eighties--none of us play much,
being out in space most of the time, you know--sometimes, when my hook
is going particularly well, I go up into the nineties."

"We'll lick that hook," she promised, as they entered an elevator and
were borne upward, toward the prow of the great interplanetary cruiser.

CHAPTER II

----But Does Not Arrive

"All out--we climb the rest of the way on foot," Stevens told his
companion, as the elevator stopped at the uppermost passenger floor.
They walked across the small circular hall and the guard on duty came
to attention and saluted as they approached him.

"I have orders to pass you and Miss Newton, sir. Do you know all the
combinations?"

"I know this good old tub better than the men that built her--I helped
calculate her," Stevens replied, as he stepped up to an apparently blank
wall of steel and deftly manipulated an almost invisible dial set flush
with its surface. "This is to keep the passengers where they belong," he
explained, as a section of the wall swung backward in a short arc and
slid smoothly aside. "We will now proceed to see what makes it tick."

Ladder after ladder of steel they climbed, and bulkhead after bulkhead
opened at Stevens's knowing touch. At each floor the mathematician
explained to the girl the operation of the machinery there automatically
at work--devices for heating and cooling, devices for circulating,
maintaining, and purifying the air and the water--in short, all the
complex mechanism necessary for the comfort and convenience of the human
cargo of the liner.

Soon they entered the conical top compartment, a room scarcely fifteen
feet in diameter, tapering sharply upward to a hollow point some
twenty feet above them. The true shape of the room, however, was not
immediately apparent, because of the enormous latticed beams and
girders which braced the walls in every direction. The air glowed
with the violet light of the twelve great ultra-light projectors, like
searchlights with three-foot lenses, which lined the wall. The floor
beneath their feet was not