"What d'ya mean, 'those days,' you disrespectful young ape? I can still pick _men_, son!" Kim grinned back at Kit, but sobered quickly. "There's more to this than meets the eye. They went through the strain once, and know what it means. They can take it, and just about all of them will come back. With a crew of kids, twenty per cent would be a high estimate." As soon as the vessel passed System Limits, Kit got another surprise. Even though those men were studded with brass and were, by a boy's standard, _old_, they were not passengers. In their old _Dauntless_ and well away from port, they gleefully threw off their full-dress uniforms. Each donned the clothing of his status of twenty-odd years back and went to work. The members of the regular crew, young as all regular space crewmen are, did not know at first whether they liked the idea of working watch-and-watch with such heavy brass or not, but they soon found out that they did. Those men were men. It is an ironclad rule of space, however, that operating pilots must be young. Master Pilot Henry Henderson cursed that ruling sulphurously, even while he watched with a proud, if somewhat jaundiced eye, the smooth performance of his son Henry at his own old board. They approached their destination--cut the jets--felt for the vortex--found it--cut in the special generators. Then, as the fields of the ship reacted against those of the tube, every man aboard felt a malaise to which no being has ever become accustomed. Most men become immune rather quickly to seasickness, to airsickness, and even to space-sickness. Interdimensional acceleration, however, is something else. It is different--just how different cannot be explained to anyone who has never experienced it. The almost unbearable acceleration ceased. They were in the tube. Every plate showed blank; everywhere there was the same drab and featureless gray. There was neither light nor darkness; there was simply and indescribably--nothing whatever, not even empty space. Kit threw a switch. There was a wrenching, twisting shock, followed by a deceleration exactly as sickening as the acceleration had been. It ceased. They were in that enigmatic nth space which each of the older men remembered so well; in which so many of their "natural laws" did not hold. Time still raced, stopped, or ran backward, seemingly at whim; inert bodies had intrinsic velocities far above that of light--and so on. Each of those men, about to be marooned of his own choice in this utterly hostile environment, drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders as he prepared to disembark. "That's computation, Kit!" Kinnison exclaimed after one glance into a plate. "That's the same planet we worked on before, right there. All our machines and stuff, untouched. If you'd figured it any closer, it'd have been a collision course. Are you dead sure, Kit, that everything's all set?" "Dead sure, Dad, in full duplicate, and Thorndyke and Henderson both know the board."