ever been there before, he said.

He had a measure of Anita's earnest naive personality. Or was he a
very clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a
chuckle that could so befool me?

"Well talk again, Haljan. You interest me--I've enjoyed it."

He sauntered away from me, joining the saturnine Ob Hahn, with whom
presently I heard him discussing religion.

The arrest of Johnson had caused considerable discussion among the
passengers. A few had seen me drag him forward to the cage. The
incident had been the subject of discussion all afternoon. Captain
Carter had posted a notice to the effect that Johnson's accounts had
been found in serious error, and that Dr. Frank for this voyage would
act in his stead.

* * * * *

It was near midnight when Snap and I closed and sealed the radio room
and started for the chart room, where we were to meet with Captain
Carter and the other officers. The passengers had nearly all retired.
A game was in progress in the smoking room, but the deck was almost
deserted.

Snap and I were passing along one of the interior corridors. The
stateroom doors were all closed. The metal grid of the floor echoed
our footsteps. Snap was in advance of me. His body suddenly rose in
the air. He went like a balloon to the ceiling, struck it gently, and
all in a heap came floating down and landed on the floor!

"What in the infernal--"

He was laughing as he picked himself up. But it was a brief laugh. We
knew what had happened: the artificial gravity controls in the base of
the ship, which by magnetic force gave us normality aboard, were being
tampered with! For just this instant, this particular small section of
this corridor had been cut off. The slight bulk of the _Planetara_,
floating in space, had no appreciable gravity pull on Snap's body, and
the impulse of his step as he came to the unmagnetized area of the
corridor had thrown him to the ceiling. The area was normal now. Snap
and I tested it gingerly.

He gripped me. "That never went wrong by accident, Gregg! Someone--"

We rushed to the nearest descending ladder. In the deserted lower room
the bank of dials stood neglected. A score of dials and switches were
here, governing the magnetism of different areas of the ship. There
should have been a night operator, but he was gone.

Than we saw him lying nearby, sprawled, face down on the floor! In the
silence and dim, lurid glow of the fluoresc