We went to the turret. Moa watched me and Snap, a grim, cold Amazon. She avoided looking at Anita, whom Miko helped down the ladders with a strange mixture of courtierlike grace and amused irony. Coniston gazed at Anita with falling jaw. "I say! Not George Prince? The girl--" "No time for argument now," Miko commanded. "It's the girl, masquerading as her brother. Get below, Coniston. Haljan takes us down." The astounded Englishman continued gazing at Anita. "I mean to say, where to on the Moon? Not to encounter Grantline at once, Miko? Our equipment is not ready." "Of course not. We will land well away. He won't be suspicious--we can signal him again after we land. We will have time to plan, to assemble the equipment. Get below, I told you." The reluctant Coniston left us. I took the controls. Miko, still holding Anita as though she were a child, sat beside me. "We will watch him, little Anita. A skilled fellow at this sort of work." I rang my signals for the shifting of the gravity plates. The answer should have come from below within a second or two. But it did not. Miko regarded me with his great bushy eyebrows upraised. "Ring again, Haljan." I duplicated. No answer. The silence was frightening. Ominous. Miko muttered, "That accursed Hahn. Ring again!" I sent the imperative emergency demand. * * * * * No answer. A second or two. Then all of us in the turret were startled. Transfixed. From below came a sudden hiss. It sounded in the turret: it came from shifting-room call-grid. The hissing of the pneumatic valves of the plate-shifters in the lower control room. The valves were opening; the plates automatically shifting into neutral, and disconnecting! An instant of startled silence. Miko may have realized the significance of what had happened. Certainly Snap and I did. The hissing ceased. I gripped the emergency plate-shifter switch which hung over my head. Its disc was dead! The plates were dead in neutral. In the positions they were only placed while in port! And their shifting mechanisms were imperative! I was on my feet. "Snap! Good God, we're in neutral!" Miko, if he had not realized it before, was aware if it now. The Moon-disc moved visibly as the _Planetara_ lurched. The vault of the heavens was slowly swinging. Miko ripped out a heavy oath. "Haljan! What is this?" He stood up, still holding Anita. But there was nothing that he could do in this emergency. "Haljan--what--" The heavens turned with a giant swoop. The Moon was over us. It swung in dizzying arc. Overhead, then back past our stern; under us, then appearing over our bow. The _Planetara_ had turned over. Upending. Rotating, end over end.