Dorothy Gilbert took his arm. “Come with me,” she whispered. “I have some more data for you; you’ve done wonderfully.” The two left the room, heads close together. An instant later a faint shriek reached the ears of those in the control room, followed by gibbering noises. Nick made a dive for the exit, to find Edgar cackling faintly to himself as Dorothy led him away. “There, there,” she soothed, “it wasn’t your fault. Now you just go and get a nice long rest, then we’ll help you with the new calculations....” CHAPTER II INCREDIBLE WORLD “Here it is,” exclaimed Dorothy wearily, planking down a sheaf of motors. “If you can follow through on this, Joe, we’ll find the missing. We keep on straight ahead, at right angles to Earth’s ecliptic.” She closed her eyes. “Did you know,” she murmured to no one in particular, “that Edgar’s secret ambition is to purr like a cat?” “How is he?” asked Nick anxiously. “In a drunken stupor. After all he’s been through I didn’t have the heart to say no to him. So he emptied an almost full bottle of the rocket blast.” She beamed at Nick. “Edgar has a special name for each grade of alcoholate we distill; this is the stiff one.” “We’ll have to make some more of that,” declared Marquis. “Heigh ho, it’s back to the primitive. Y’know, scientists are pretty sure that savages spend most of their ingenuity in figuring out ways to make better and still better hooch. Disgusting, isn’t it?” “Hang on to your stanchions,” yelled Timbie as he pressed a button which would send a warning signal throughout the ship, “we’re accelerating.” Instinctively they obeyed. Without the contracels, they would have been an obscene mass of mangled protoplasm in the seconds that followed; as it was, they experienced something like the feeling one obtains on the downward sweep of a stiff roller coaster. “Keep a close check on the direction, Joe,” grated Nick. The impact of acceleration did not last long, but it was some five minutes before they really felt normal again. Timbie bent over calculations, a frown working its way across his forehead. “I don’t like the way this is working out,” he muttered. “Following Edgar’s equations?” asked Dorothy, picking up the sheet. She glanced over them quickly. “Nothing wrong here only—jeepers, you’re right, Joe! Stop the bus, quick!” “What’s wrong?” demanded Nick. “Nothing—except that we’ve passed them. They’re behind us now!” Timbie’s hands flew over the controls rapidly. “Some day, after the contracel principle has really been perfected, we’re going to have ships that are practically without inertia so long as the power’s on. Ships that can stop dead like that without any terrifying results and go back the way they came as neat as the ancient’s trains on their tracks. But we have to decelerate slowly or we’re basket cases, if anybody ever finds us at all.” * * * * *