gay,
pleasant young man. I could almost have fancied I liked him. Or was it
because he was Anita's brother? He told me how he looked forward to
traveling with her on Mars. No, he had never been there before, he
said.

He had a measure of Anita's earnest naive personality. Or was he a very
clever scoundrel, with irony lurking in his soft voice, and a chuckle
that he could so befool me?

"We'll talk again, Haljan. You interest me--I've enjoyed it."

He sauntered away from me, joining the saturnine Ob Hahn, with whom
presently I heard him discussing religion.

The arrest of Johnson had caused considerable comment among the
passengers. A few had seen me drag him forward to the cage. The incident
had been the subject of passenger discussion all afternoon. Captain
Carter had posted a notice to the effect that Johnson's accounts had
been found in serious error, and that Dr. Frank for this voyage would
act in his stead.

* * * * *

It was near midnight when Snap and I closed and sealed the helio-room
and started for the chart-room, where we were to meet with Captain
Carter and the other officers. The passengers had nearly all retired. A
game was in progress in the smoking room, but the deck was almost
deserted.

Snap and I were passing along one of the interior corridors. The
stateroom doors, with the illumined names of the passengers, were all
closed. The metal grid of the floor echoed our footsteps. Snap was in
advance of me. His body suddenly rose in the air. He went like a balloon
to the ceiling, struck it gently, and all in a heap came floating down
and landed on the floor!

"What in the infernal!--"

He was laughing as he picked himself up. But it was a brief laugh. We
knew what had happened: the artificial gravity-controls in the base of
the ship, which by magnetic force gave us normality aboard, were being
tampered with! For just this instant, this particular small section of
this corridor had been cut off. The slight bulk of the Planetara,
floating in space, had no appreciable gravity pull on Snap's body, and
the impulse of his step as he came to the unmagnetized area of the
corridor had thrown him to the ceiling. The area was normal now. Snap
and I tested it gingerly.

He gripped me. "That never went wrong by accident, Gregg! Someone down
there--"

* * * * *

We rushed to the nearest descending ladder. In the deserted lower room
the bank