ould make
this baby a super."

He came over and looked himself. While he was looking the pointer moved
up to twenty and then down to six tenths.

"Must be out of order," Ford muttered. "Well, this'll give you
experience with emergency equipment. Break out the manual gravy dish,
Ren."

It was a fine coil spring in a glass tube. Other glass tubes fastened
on, to make the length almost ten feet. At one g the spring with its
weight would stretch out to the bottom. From there to a ten thousandth
of a g the spring rose up to a point half-way.

Ren put it together speedily, placing it in the wall clamps designed to
hold it. The glass itself was graduated with the scale of gravity
strength. The cylindrical weight at the free end of the spring had a
line on it that would coincide with the proper reading.

In practice it vibrated up and down so that it had to be read by
estimation of the half-way point of the up and down motion.

Ren and Ford watched the red weight with its black line. It moved slowly
and uniformly from the bottom to the top of the scale, from a full g to
ten thousandth of a g, and back down again.

Meanwhile the gravity potentiometer (gravy board) was changing its
reading constantly and erratically.

Ford licked his lips nervously and said, "Don't know what the old man'll
say about this, but it looks like all we can say is that the thing _has_
gravity."

"Why not call him and let him see for himself?" Ren asked.

Ford looked out the viewport at the round object in the distance and
shook his head.

"I've got a hunch he knows it already," he said slowly. "The ship is
probably on a nonsense track and the automatic tracker is either trying
to find out what the law of gravity is, or is exploring for clues to
light aberration. One gets you ten he'll give me a buzz in another
minute."

He was right. The phone rang almost at once. It was Hugh Dunnam himself,
asking for the gravy reading.

"You'll have to see it to believe it," Ford Gratrick said over the
phone. "The manual swing is uniform over the whole range. The gravy
board can't make up its mind where to settle at. It tries this and that
reading."

He listened briefly. "Yes, sir," he said, and hung up. "He wants you in
the pilot room, Ren," he added.

Ren started out of the central instrument room through the axis tube.

"Better be careful," Ford shouted after him. "No telling how this
gravitation will behave. Don't let it slam you against anyt