ir shipyard. I'm staying here in Storisende; we're opening an
office here. By this time next week, we're all going to wish we'd been
born quintuplets."

"And Conn Maxwell, I suppose, will be an influential
non-office-holding stockholder?"

"That's right. Just like in L. E. & S."

XII

He found Jerry Rivas and Anse Dawes and a score of workmen making a
survey and inventory of the spaceport. Captain Nichols and four of the
original crew of the _Harriet Barne_, who had shared his captivity
among the pirates, had stayed to take care of the ship. And Fred
Karski, with one gun-cutter and a couple of light airboats, was
keeping up a routine guard. All of them had heard about the formation
of Alpha-Interplanetary when Conn arrived.

The next day, Yves Jacquemont arrived, accompanied by Mack Vibart, a
gang from the T. & O. shipyard, and a dozen engineers and construction
men whom he had recruited around Storisende. More workers arrived in
the next few days, including a number who had already worked on the
ship as slaves of the Perales gang.

It didn't take Conn long to appreciate the problems involved in the
conversion. Built to operate only inside planetary atmosphere and
gravitation, the _Harriet Barne_ was long and narrow, like an old
ocean ship; more than anything else, she had originally resembled a
huge submarine. Spaceships, either interplanetary or interstellar,
were always spherical with a pseudogravity system at the center. This,
of course, the _Harriet Barne_ lacked.

"Well, are we going to make the whole trip in free fall?" he wanted to
know.

"No, we'll use our acceleration for pseudograv halfway, and
deceleration the other half," Jacquemont told him. "We'll be in free
fall about ten or fifteen hours. What we're going to have to do will
be to lift off from Poictesme in the horizontal position the ship was
designed for, and then make a ninety-degree turn after we're
off-planet, with our lift and our drive working together, just like
one of the old rocket ships before the Abbott Drive was developed."

That meant, of course, that the after bulkheads would become decks,
and explained a lot of the oddities he had noticed about the
conversion job. It meant that everything would have to be mounted on
gimbals, everything stowed so as to be secure in either position, and
nothing placed where it would be out of reach in either.

Jacquemont and Nichols took charge of the work on the ship herself.
Chief En