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of you," Lahoma retorted icily, and although she did not look at me as she said that, my heart quickened its tempo at the hidden inference in her words. So it was settled. The four of us were to go as soon as school let out the next summer. During the winter Mallory and I would build the space ship in the old boat house down on the beach just a few blocks from the campus. * * * * * It was really fun that winter, working late into the night putting the space ship together. Our crowning achievement was retractible wings for steering the ship in atmosphere. In space, of course, steering would have to be done by small steering rockets. The main drive force, though, would be the missing link, as we had been calling it all winter. Came the spring, as somebody in the English department might say, and the ship was complete. During the spring months we used the last of our joint resources to stock it with all sorts of things, including seeds for planting, in case we could not get back, or didn't want to come back. Our final load, at the end of the school year, was books. Nothing but books, and literally tons of them on everything from languages to philosophy, from farming to the Bessemer Process. Then we were ready. During the winter we had all read everything we could get on interplanetary travel. Most of it was, of course, fiction, but each author had his own little idea that we could consider, so that by the time we were ready to shove off we had a fairly complete grasp of every problem we could possibly encounter--or so we fondly hoped. The ship was cigar-shaped, about eighty feet long and twenty feet in diameter. It had been built so that in space, away from gravity, we could start it spinning with the small rockets and use centrifugal force to keep us on the deck, which lined the shell. There were ballast tanks to keep one side down when in a gravity field, the water ballast being transferred to the center tube tank before the spin was started, to transfer the center of mass of the ship to the axis of rotation. We started early in the evening, heading into the east to take advantage of the thousand-mile-an-hour speed of the earth's surface. The missing link, the hunk of tellecarbon, was encased in a polished brass case in the exact center of gravity of the ship, strong girders connecting it to the shell. A sound-proof booth surrounded it in which the operator would not be dis
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