bservatory. He was letting down a
spliced beryllium plumb line, his gaze riveted on the slowly turning
horizontal drum of a windlass which contained more than two hundred feet
of gleaming metal cordage.

Suddenly as he stared the drum stopped revolving. Lawton stiffened, a
startled expression coming into his face. He had been playing a hunch
that had seemed as insane, rationally considered, as his wild idea about
the bulkhead porosities. For a moment he was stunned, unable to believe
that he had struck pay dirt. The winch indicator stood at one hundred
and three feet, giving him a rich, fruity yield of startlement.

One hundred feet below him the plummet rested on something solid that
sustained it in space. Scarcely breathing, Lawton leaned over the
windlass and stared downward. There was nothing visible between the ship
and the fleecy clouds far below except a tiny black dot resting on
vacancy and a thin beryllium plumb line ascending like an interrogation
point from the dot to the 'chute opening.

"You see something down there?" Slashaway asked.

Lawton moved back from the windlass, his brain whirling. "Slashaway
there's a solid surface directly beneath us, but it's completely
invisible."

"You mean it's like a frozen cloud, sir?"

"No, Slashaway. It doesn't shimmer, or deflect light. Congealed water
vapor would sink instantly to earth."

"You think it's all around us, sir?"

Lawton stared at Slashaway aghast. In his crude fumblings the gym
slugger had ripped a hidden fear right out of his subconsciousness into
the light.

"I don't know, Slashaway," he muttered. "I'll get at that next."

* * * * *

A half hour later Lawton sat beside the captain's desk in the control
room, his face drained of all color. He kept his gaze averted as he
talked. A man who succeeds too well with an unpleasant task may develop
a subconscious sense of guilt.

"Sir, we're suspended inside a hollow sphere which resembles a huge,
floating soap bubble. Before we ripped through it it must have had a
plastic surface. But now the tear has apparently healed over, and the
shell all around us is as resistant as steel. We're completely bottled
up, sir. I shot rocket leads in all directions to make certain."

The expression on Forrester's face sold mere amazement down the river.
He could not have looked more startled if the nearer planets had
yielded their secrets chillingly, and a super-race had a