"I wondered how elephants would like weightlessness, so I took my Indian elephant up on a little jaunt around Earth's satellite. The Moon, they call it. Elephants don't like weightlessness at all." He paused, and signaled the bartender for another drink. "I hope you never have to clean up after a space-sick elephant," he said darkly. "That meant that I'd have to put spin on the _Crucis_ for the entire trip back to Penguin. It's hard enough to try to navigate in hyperspace with spin on your ship, but that wasn't the worst of it. An elephant is a tremendous amount of off-center load for a ship with a large fraction of a one-gee spin on it. Too much load even to think about handling. Even though I couldn't come up with an answer, right off hand, I went ahead and turned in my Indian elephant on an African model. Beulah was her name, and she was a husky girl. She weighed in at just a little more than eight tons." I waved my whisky glass at Captain Hannah. "But I don't see your problem," I said. "If you put the elephant on one side and his food on the other, there wouldn't be any off-balanced load, would there?" "Not until the food was eaten, anyway," said the skipper witheringly, and I subsided with a fresh drink. * * * * * "Beulah was kind of cute, for all of her tonnage," said the skipper. "She had two enormous tusks, and a pair of ears like wings, and a nose that was longer than her tail. But she was mighty friendly, after she got to know me. She'd pick me up and carry me around, if I asked her to. And she'd eat right out of my hand. She turned out to be even tamer than the Indian elephant. All I had to do was figure out how to carry her. "For a starter, I figured like you said, to have Beulah on one side of the cargo compartment, and her chow on the other. Then I calculated to have my own supplies on the other two sides of the space, so that I could move them away from her as her food stocks got smaller, and hold the balance that way. That wasn't enough, of course, so I built a couple of water tanks on the opposite side of the ring from Beulah. "As you know, not much can be done about moving water around in a space ship--it's got its own cooling chores to perform--but every little bit helped. Finally, I jockeyed the master computer and the auxiliary computer down and ran them on tracks, so I could slide them around to compensate for Beulah's appetite. Some lead slugs brought the auxiliary's weight up equal to the master's, and they also brought my total load up to the absolute maximum that I could carry. "It was almost enough. But a miss is as good as a mile, for a space ship. I was stuck, and there didn't seem to be a thing I could do about it. Even if I could have carried more weight it wouldn't have helped. Any more mass in the cargo compartment would have thrown the c.g. too far aft." He beckoned for more rhial.