men it'll be ten out of ten."

"You may be right, of course, but it sounds kind of far-fetched to me."

"Wait and see, chum," Sandra said, with a laugh.

Hilton made his announcement and everyone moved aground the next day. No
one, however, had elected to live alone. Almost everyone had chosen to
double up; the most noteworthy exceptions being twelve laboratory girls
who had decided to keep on living together. However, they now had a
twenty-room house instead of a one-room dormitory to live in, and a
staff of twenty Oman girls to help them do it.

Hilton had suggested that Temple and Teddy, whose house was only a
hundred yards or so from the Hilton-Karns bungalow, should have supper
and spend the first evening with them; but the girls had knocked that
idea flat. Much better, they thought, to let things ride as nearly as
possible exactly as they had been aboard the _Perseus_.

"A _little_ smooching now and then, on the Q strictly T, but that's all,
darling. That's _positively_ all," Temple had said, after a highly
satisfactory ten minutes alone with him in her own gloriously private
room, and that was the way it had to be.

Hence it was a stag inspection that Hilton and Karns made of their new
home. It was very long, very wide, and for its size very low. Four of
its five rooms were merely adjuncts to its tremendous living-room. There
was a huge fireplace at each end of this room, in each of which a fire
of four-foot-long fir cordwood crackled and snapped. There was a great
hi-fi tri-di, with over a hundred tapes, all new.

"Yes, sirs," Larry and Javvy spoke in unison. "The players and singers
who entertained the Masters of old have gone back to work. They will
also, of course, appear in person whenever and wherever you wish."

* * * * *

Both men looked around the vast room and Karns said: "All the comforts
of home and a couple of bucks' worth besides. Wall-to-wall carpeting an
inch and a half thick. A grand piano. Easy chairs and loafers and
davenports. Very fine reproductions of our favorite paintings ... and
statuary."

"You said it, brother." Hilton was bending over a group in bronze. "If I
didn't know better, I'd swear this is the original deHaven 'Dance of the
Nymphs'."

Karns had marched up to and was examining minutely a two-by-three-foot
painting, in a heavy gold frame, of a gorgeously auburn-haired nude.
"Reproduction, hell! This is a _duplicate_! Lawrence's 'Innocent'