it, and moved on.

Just ahead of him was the irrigation tube. Again Conroy called on his special knowledge of the Agronomy section. This particular acreage of corn was in the harvest season—almost ready to cut. There wouldn't be any water in the irrigation tubes now.

The tube was a little over three feet across and dropped down into the sub-levels of the ship, where the water-purifiers were. Conroy peered into the tube's depths for a moment, then lifted up the hinged cover, lowered himself into the tube, and braced his feet against one side and his shoulders against the other.

Closing the cover, then, in total blackness, he began to lower himself down the tube. Hands, shoulders, feet; hands, shoulders, feet. Over and over again, as mountain climbers work their way up and down crevasses.

After several minutes, he was startled by a sudden glow of light from above. He glanced up. The opening of the tube was nearly a hundred feet overhead now. He wondered if they would be able to pick him out in the darkness, this far down the shaft.

"Can you see him?" called a voice that echoed through the steel tube. Conroy could see a head silhouetted against the light.

"It goes straight down, and there's no ladder," came the reply. It was Bayliss Kent's voice. "I don't see him down there."

"What kind of tube is this?" the first voice asked. Hal Lester, Kent's chief henchman.

"Irrigation, I think."

"Well, if he has managed to get down it, he's gotten clean away. Bayliss, I told you we shouldn't have let Conroy know our plans."

"Never mind that now!" Kent snapped coldly. "Search the cornfield! He must be here somewhere—and we've got to find him before the local agronomist comes by on his inspection rounds."

There was the sound of the door being lowered, and darkness came again. Peter Conroy heaved a sigh of relief and continued working his way down the tube.

He knew these tubes well. His father was an Agronomist, and, until Peter had taken up navigation, he had helped his father on the farmlands. The ship was like a sealed world, a hollow metal planet five miles in diameter that was carrying its crew through space on the generations-long voyage to Procyon.

Or would the starship ever get to Procyon? Was 

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