enerators and purifiers
for water and air, and the numberless other mechanisms which would make
the cruiser a comfortable and secure home, as well as an invincible
battleship, in the heatless, lightless, airless, matterless waste of
illimitable, inter-galactic space. Many compartments were for the
storage of food-supplies, and these were even then being filled by
forces under the able direction of the first of Chemistry.

"All the comforts of home, even to the labels," Seaton grinned, as he
read "Dole No. 1" upon cans of pineapple which had never been within
thousands of light-years of the Hawaiian Islands, and saw quarter after
quarter of fresh meat going into the freezer room from a planet upon
which no animal other than man had existed for many thousands of years.
Nearly all of the remaining millions of cubic feet of space were for the
storage of uranium for power, a few rooms already having been filled
with ingot inoson for repairs. Between the many bulkheads that divided
the ship into numberless airtight sections, and between the many
concentric skins of purple metal that rendered the vessel space-worthy
and sound, even though slabs many feet thick were to be shown off in any
direction--in every nook and cranny could be stored the metal to keep
those voracious generators full-fed, no matter how long or how severe
the demand for power. Every room was connected through a series of
tubular tunnels, along which force-propelled cars or elevators slid
smoothly--tubes whose walls fell together into air-tight seals at any
point, in case of a rupture.

As they made their way back to the great control-room room of the
vessel, they saw something that because of its small size and clear
transparency they had not previously seen. Below that room, not too near
the outer skin, in a specially-built spherical launching space, there
was _Skylark Two_, completely equipped and ready for an interstellar
journey on her own account!

"Why, hello, little stranger!" Margaret called. "Rovol, that was a kind
thought on your part. Home wouldn't quite be home without our old
_Skylark_, would it, Martin?"

"A practical thought, as well as a kind one," Crane responded. "We
undoubtedly will have occasion to visit places altogether too small for
the really enormous bulk of this vessel."

"Yes, and whoever heard of a sea-going ship without a small boat?" put
in irrepressible Dorothy. "She's just too perfectly kippy for words,
sitting up there