*

With an effort, O'Rourke brought his thoughts in line with the
question. "Oh, you mean the man-thing I saw in Stobolsk? Yes, that's
right; he had a thing like a gun."

"And he held it in his hand?"

"In the big paw that passed for a hand, yes!"

"All right! Now think carefully, Danny, and tell me: was there
anything fastened to it--a wire, perhaps--a connection of some kind
with the ground?"

O'Rourke stared at the pink and white face of the cherub who sat with
him in the control room of a rocket-ship that threw itself like a red
meteor across the high skies. "You're a bit of a devil, yourself," he
said wonderingly at last. "How in the names of the Saints did you
know? Yes, there was a wire, and I had forgotten it myself. It hung
down, I remember, from the butt of the thing. But not to the ground.
Infant--you missed it there; 'twas looped back like into the folds of
the damn blue nightie he wore."

"And then went to the ground," said the Infant imperturbably,
"--through his shoes most likely; or, if the robe was metal, that may
have dragged on the ground instead."

He smiled seraphically at the bewildered pilot as he added: "That's
all, Danny, for the present. Fly your little tin ship. I've got some
heavy thinking to do."

Danny heard him ask one cryptic question, but he asked it as one who
knows that only from his own brain can come the answer.

"How do they get rid of it?" the Infant was demanding. "If they stay
in the air, how do they get rid of the load?"

And Pilot O'Rourke was glad enough to leave the answer to that one to
the Infant. For had not the Infant alone seen the only reasonable
answer to the puzzle of the mysterious man? And Danny had learned that
it takes a real man and a real mind to track truth to her hiding place
and accept the absurd improbabilities on which truth rests.

* * * * *

They were approaching their destination when the Infant opened his
Cupid's-bow mouth to pronounce one additional question. "How high," he
asked, "will your little tin ship fly? I know they've reached just
under a hundred thousand experimentally, but how high will this one
go?"

"And that's a question neither you nor I can answer, Infant." Danny
was working with careful fingers at tiny levers; their control room
was filled with whining whispers and thin shrieks. "We're goin' down
now," he continued, and again flipped over the switch that would put
him in communication