"Yes," said Solly very seriously. "I can tell you this about the star-ship. On a voyage of two and a half years, nothing can be done haphazardly, at the last minute. Every berth has to be accounted for long in advance. Our baggage has been calculated down to the last ounce. The number of farming implements, the number of livestock--even the number of children you may have en route!--are strictly allocated." "In other words, the only way we can get aboard is if someone dies or doesn't show up at the last minute?" said Celia. "Or if you can persuade someone not to make the trip." "And in addition get by the police," I added softly. * * * * * At seven that morning the airbus stopped to pick up the Mendelsohns and their hand luggage. We had worked out some kind of half-baked plan that I didn't think would go over with the ship's officials. We set a rendezvous time and place and waved them off. Then we got into our Cad Super. For the second time it bore us west to Spaceport. As we neared the field, Celia commented, "You know, darling, this car is pretty conspicuous in the daytime." "I'm hungry, mommy," said Freddie who had missed out on breakfast altogether. Celia gave him a soggy hors d'oeuvre, which was all that was left from the Mendelsohn's party. I had been thinking about what to do with our expensive car. I brought it down almost a mile from the star-ship _Pericles_. "You two will have to walk the rest of the way," I said cheerily. "I'll meet you at our rendezvous point in about twenty-five minutes." The time was now seven-thirty. The ship blasted off at nine. I put our car in a steep climb and circled the field at an altitude of ten thousand feet, where I could see which of the many spaceships were loading passengers. I chose one ship arbitrarily at the opposite end of the field from the star-ship. It turned out to be an Asteroid surveyor, paying its way with a hundred or so passengers to Ganymede. I set down in the adjoining lot, and fixed the degravity controls so that the ship hovered a few inches off the ground, and left it that way to drift across the field with the wind until it attracted the inevitable attention. I walked to the next shuttle bus stop and rode across to the _Pericles_. It was a gigantic ship, twenty times the capacity of a Venus or Mars rocket. Comet-shaped, engineered to approach fifty per cent of the speed of light through cumulative acceleration, the star-ship had two vast cargo entrances in addition to the passenger airlock. In one, which was now closing, I caught sight of crated farm machinery. Into the other, herds of cattle were being driven.