part of his face to touch the liquid. It was a standard joke to confront recruits, on their first free flight, with the same problem. If nose or cheek touched the sphere, surface tension did the rest.

Little returned to the door and took up what he intended to be a permanent station there. He was waiting partly for some sign of human beings, partly for evidence of his captors, and, more and more as time wore on, for some trace of solid food. He waited in vain for all three. At intervals, a pint or so of lime juice came through the jet and formed a globe in the air beside it; nothing else. Little had always liked the stuff, but his opinion was slowly changing as more and more of it was forced on him. It was all there was to drink, and the air seemed to be rather dry; at any rate, he got frightfully thirsty at what seemed unusually short intervals.

He wound his watch and discovered that the "feedings" came at intervals of a little over four hours. He had plenty of chance to make observations, and nothing else to observe; it was not long before he was able to predict within a few seconds the arrival of another drink. Later, he wished he hadn't figured it out; the last five or ten minutes of each wait were characterized by an almost agonizing thirst, none the less painful for being purely mental. Sometimes he slept, but he was always awake at the zero minute.

With nothing to occupy his mind but fruitless speculation, it is not surprising that he lost all track of the number of feedings. He knew only that he had slept a large number of times, had become deathly sick of lime juice, and was beginning to suffer severely from the lack of other food, when a faint suggestion of weight manifested itself. He looked at his equalizer the instant he noticed the situation and found it dark. The ship had cut its second-order converters, and was applying a very slight first-order acceleration in its original line of flight--the barely perceptible weight was directed toward what Little had found to be the stern. Its direction changed by a few degrees on several occasions, but was restored each time in a few seconds. The intensity remained constant, as nearly as Little could tell, for several hours.

Then it increased, smoothly but swiftly, to a value only slightly below that of Earthly gravity. The alterations in direction became more frequent, but never sudden or violent enough to throw Little off his feet--he was now standing on the rear wall, which had become the floor. Evidently the ship's pilot, organic or mechanical, well deserved the name. For nearly half an hour by the 

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