of you," Lahoma retorted icily, and although she did
not look at me as she said that, my heart quickened its tempo at the
hidden inference in her words.

So it was settled. The four of us were to go as soon as school let out
the next summer. During the winter Mallory and I would build the space
ship in the old boat house down on the beach just a few blocks from the
campus.

* * * * *

It was really fun that winter, working late into the night putting the
space ship together. Our crowning achievement was retractible wings for
steering the ship in atmosphere. In space, of course, steering would
have to be done by small steering rockets. The main drive force, though,
would be the missing link, as we had been calling it all winter.

Came the spring, as somebody in the English department might say, and
the ship was complete. During the spring months we used the last of our
joint resources to stock it with all sorts of things, including seeds
for planting, in case we could not get back, or didn't want to come
back. Our final load, at the end of the school year, was books. Nothing
but books, and literally tons of them on everything from languages to
philosophy, from farming to the Bessemer Process.

Then we were ready. During the winter we had all read everything we
could get on interplanetary travel. Most of it was, of course, fiction,
but each author had his own little idea that we could consider, so that
by the time we were ready to shove off we had a fairly complete grasp of
every problem we could possibly encounter--or so we fondly hoped.

The ship was cigar-shaped, about eighty feet long and twenty feet in
diameter. It had been built so that in space, away from gravity, we
could start it spinning with the small rockets and use centrifugal force
to keep us on the deck, which lined the shell. There were ballast tanks
to keep one side down when in a gravity field, the water ballast being
transferred to the center tube tank before the spin was started, to
transfer the center of mass of the ship to the axis of rotation.

We started early in the evening, heading into the east to take advantage
of the thousand-mile-an-hour speed of the earth's surface.

The missing link, the hunk of tellecarbon, was encased in a polished
brass case in the exact center of gravity of the ship, strong girders
connecting it to the shell. A sound-proof booth surrounded it in which
the operator would not be dis