Ava Longacre snorted. "I'll bet you were a hellion in your youth," she snapped. "And in your old age you're a nasty old lecher."

Hanson squinted at her. "I wish I were forty again," he leered. "But worry not, m'lady. Maybe the basic idea was mine, but Maculay kissed you on his own account. And I commend his taste."

Ava uttered a single, explosive "Oh!" and stalked out angrily, slamming the door behind her. She leaned against the hardwood panels and listened to the roar of Hanson's laughter die in a slow gurgle. She pegged it properly as part hysteria; the hours of hard mental effort spent on Maculay would have taken a lot of pep out of the Old Boy, and he would then clutch at anything remotely amusing and make an uproariously funny incident out of it. But this was not funny.

She remembered Maculay's hand on her, and her body went supple against the door. Then by sheer mental effort she snapped her head erect and walked from the door, determined to forget it.

Ava did not recognize the fact that for hours, days, or months—and perhaps forever—she might be telling herself that it was a good thing to forget about.

The Island Princess took off on schedule, arrowed into the blackness of space, and set her nose-sight on Venus. She was forty hours a-space when it happened. And the Island Princess was one of the four spacecraft close enough to the thing to have its presence recorded in the celestial globe.

It came with a roar of sound from the radio, which eliminated all communications instantly, and continued on a diminishing power for an hour until it fell below the cosmic noise level. It appeared in the celestial globe as an ebon shaft; measurements made it a half mile in diameter but extending from beyond the range of the globe in both directions. It was as straight as it could be. On the other ships, the same facts were noted.

Upon the several planets of the solar system, cosmic-ray counters went crazy. Showers of unprecedented violence bathed the solar system in a raging torrent of high-energy particles. The showers continued, diminishing in intensity as time went on; the slower particles arriving last, of course.

But the one thing that caused consternation throughout the entire solar system was a sickening shift. Spacecraft and planet gave a tiny, queasy slip, sort of like a heavy man who has just trod upon a grape. Things move according to their mass and according to their 

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