ions in the air, propelling himself forward
a few yards before he lost his balance and tumbled head over heels
against the wall.

Arkalion came to him quickly, in a combination of swimming and pushing
with hands and feet against the wall. Arkalion righted him expertly,
sat down gingerly beside him. "If you keep sudden motions to a
minimum, you'll get along fine. More than anything else, that's the
secret of it."

Temple nodded. "It's sort of like the first time you're on ice skates.
Say, how come you're so good at it?"

[Illustration]

"I used to read the old, theoretical books on space-travel." The words
poured out effortlessly, smoothly. "I'm merely applying the theories
put forward as early as the 1950's."

"Oh." But it left Temple with some food for thought. Alaric Arkalion
was a queer duck, anyway, and of all the men gathered in the
spaceship's lounge, he alone had mastered weightlessness with hardly
any trouble.

"Take your ice skates," Arkalion went on. "Some people put them on and
use them like natural extensions of their feet the first time. Others
fall all over themselves. I suppose I am lucky."

"Sure," said Temple. Actually, the only thing odd about Arkalion was
his old-young face and--perhaps--his propensity for coming up with the
right answers at the right times. Arkalion had seemed so certain of
space-travel. He'd hardly batted an eyelash when they boarded a long,
tapering, bullet-shaped ship at White Sands and thundered off into the
sky. He took for granted the change-over to a huge round ship at the
wheel-shaped station in space. Moments after leaving the space
station--with a minimum of stress and strain, thanks to the almost-nil
gravity--it was Arkalion who first swam through air to the viewport
and pointed out the huge crescent earth, green and gray and brown,
sparkling with patches of dazzling silver-white. "You will observe it
is a crescent," Arkalion had said. "It is closer to the sun than we
are, and off at an angle. As I suspected, our destination is Mars."

* * * * *

Then everyone was saying goodbye to earth. Fantastic, it seemed. There
were tears, there was laughter, cursing, promises of return, awkward
verbal comparisons with the crescent moon, vows of faithfulness to
lovers and sweethearts. And there was Arkalion, with an avid
expression in the old eyes, Arkalion with his boyish face, not saying
goodbye so much as he was calling hello to something