iles or so from the city when an
airship crashed down in a woods about half a mile from me. It was in an
uninhabited district and nobody else saw it. I went over to investigate,
thinking probably I could find out something useful. It had the whole
front end cut or broken off, and that made me curious, because no
imaginable fall will break an arenak hull. I walked in through the hole
and saw that it was one of their fighting tenders--a combination warship
and repair shop, with all of the stuff in it that I've been telling you
about. The generators were mostly burned out and the propelling and
lifting motors were out of commission. I prowled around, getting
acquainted with it, and found a lot of useful instruments and, best of
all, one of Dunark's new mechanical educators, with complete
instructions for its use. Also, I found three bodies, and thought I'd
try it out...."

"Just a minute. Only three bodies on a warship? And what good could a
mechanical educator do you if the men were all dead?"

"Three is all I found then, but there was another one. Three men and a
captain compose an Osnomian crew for any ordinary vessel. Everything is
automatic, you, know. As for the men being dead, that doesn't make any
difference--you can read their brains just the same, if they haven't
been dead too long. However, when I tried to read theirs, I found only
blanks--their brains had been destroyed so that nobody could read them.
That did look funny, so I ransacked the ship from truck to keelson, and
finally found another body, wearing an air-helmet, in a sort of closet
off the control room. I put the educator on it...."

"This is getting good. It sounds like a page of the old 'Arabian Nights'
that I used to read when I was a boy. You know, it really isn't
surprising that Brookings didn't believe a lot of this stuff."

"As I have said, a lot of it is hard to understand, but I'm going to
show it to you--all that, and more."

"Oh, I believe it, all right. After riding in this boat and looking out
of the windows, I'll believe anything. Reading a dead man's brain is
steep, though."

"I'll let you do it after we get there. I don't understand exactly how
it works, myself, but I know how to operate one. Well, I found out that
this man's brain was in good shape, and I got a shock when I read it.
Here's what he had been through. They had been flying very high on their
way to the front when their ship was seized by an invisible force and
thro