CONSULATE BY WILLIAM TENN [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Thrilling Wonder Stories June 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] CHAPTER I Sail in the Sloop I see by the papers where Professor Fronac says that interplanetary travel will have to go through what he calls a period of incubation. He says that after reaching the moon, we now have hit so many new problems that we must sit down and puzzle out new theories to fit them before we can build a ship that will get us to Venus or Mars. Of course, the Army and Navy are supervising all rocket experiments these days, and the professor's remarks are censored by them. That makes his speeches hard to understand. But you know and I know what Professor Fronac is really saying. The Second Martian Expedition was a complete flop. Just like the First Martian Expedition and the Venusian ones. The ships came back with all the machinery working fine and all the crews grinning with health. But they hadn't been to Mars. They couldn't make it. The professor goes on to say how wonderful it is that science is so wonderful, because no matter how great the obstacles, the good old scientific approach will eventually overcome them. This, he claims, is the drawing of unprejudiced conclusions from all the data available. Well, if that's what Professor Fronac really believes, he sure didn't act like it last August when I went all the way to Arizona to tell him just what he'd been doing wrong in those latest rocket experiments. Let me tell you, even if I am only a small-town grocer and he's a big physics professor with a Nobel Prize under his belt, he had no call to threaten me with a jail sentence just because I slipped past the Army guards at the field and hid in his bedroom! I was there only because I wanted to tell him he was on the wrong track. If it hadn't been for poor "Fatty" Myers and that option on the Winthrop store which he's going to lose by Christmas, I'd have
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