Because it alone possessed the required _outside force_ spoken of in Newton's "Universal Laws." And it was doing fine. Dinner was being served in the dining room. A group of shapely girls added grace to the swimming pool on the promenade deck. The bar was filled with a merry crowd which in turn were partly filled with liquor. A man in uniform, the Second Officer, was throwing darts with a few passengers in the playroom, and there were four oldish ladies on sabbatical leave who were stricken with _mal-de-void_. The passage up to now had been uneventful. A meteor or two had come to make the ship swing a bit--but the swerve was less than the pitch of an ocean vessel in a moderate sea and it did not continue as did an ocean ship. Most of the time the _Empress of Kolain_ seemed as steady as solid rock. Only the First Officer, on the bridge, and the Chief Pilot, far below in the control room, knew just how erratic their course truly was. But they were not worried. They were not a shell, fired from a gun; they were a spaceship, capable of steering themselves into any port on Venus when they arrived and the minute wobbulations in their course could be corrected when the time came. For nothing that had come across the universe yet had ever prevented the ship of space from seeing where it was going. Yes, it was uneventful. Then the meteor screen flashed into life. A circle of light appeared in the celestial dome and the ship automatic pilot swerved ever so little. The dot of light was gone. Throughout the ship, people laughed nervously. A waiter replaced a glass of water that had been set too close to the edge of the table and a manly-looking fellow dived into the swimming pool to haul a good-looking blonde back to the edge again. She'd been in the middle of a swan dive when the swerve came and the ship had swerved without her. The resounding smack of feminine stomach against the water was of greater importance than the meteor, now so many hundred miles behind. The flash of light returned and the ship swerved again. Upon the third swerve, the First Officer was watching the celestial globe with suspicion. He went white. It was conceivable that the _Empress of Kolain_ was about to encounter a meteor shower. And that was bad. He marked the place and set his observation telescope in synchronism with the celestial globe. There was nothing but the ultimate starry curtain in the background. He snapped a switch and the voice of the pilot came out of a speaker in the wall. "You called, Mr. Hendall?" "Tony, take the levers, will you please? Something is rotten in the State of Denmark." "O.K., sir. I'm riding personal." "Kick out the meteor-spotter coupling circuits and forget the alarm." "Right, Mr. Hendall, but will you confirm that in writing?" Hendall scribbled on the telautograph and then abandoned the 'scope. The flashing in the celestial globe continued, but the ship no longer danced in its path.