By far the worst feature of being caught in a vacuole is the fact that you're completely isolated from the rest of the universe. These super-spatial areas; these dead spots of hyper-emptiness, do not obey the common laws of space mechanics. There's no radio transmission through a vacuole; the only laws that seem to apply are the laws of motion and relativity. This time, even the relativist principles seemed to go haywire. Lancelot Biggs had demanded that we be patient for ten hours--but to me those ten hours seemed like ten centuries. Millennia, maybe. Seconds crawled. Minutes dragged. Hours were fabulous periods of time. You could almost sit still and feel your hair graying on your scalp. I tried to read a book, and gave it up as a bad job after I discovered I'd re-read the same page six times. Then I fiddled with my dials, but all I could get out of them was a strange, singing, unearthly hum. I had a feeling of boding suspense, as though I were an insensate beast caged in an elevator that was rising through darkness to an unguessed destination. Boy, am I getting poetic! Anyhow, that's how I felt, and if you want to make something of it, stop down by the IPS spaceport at Long Island and ask for Bert Donovan! I managed to while away a couple of hours figuring out where the _Slipstream_ was by this time. Like I said, she was a five-day freighter. But she'd lost almost a full day in her tangle with the vacuole--_our_ vacuole--and in spite of the fact that she'd now put on every bit of juice she had, she wouldn't make the trip in much less than five and a half days. Which, of course, didn't help us any. The _Saturn_ was normally a ten-day ship. Now, caught in the vacuole, it was a question of when, if ever, we got back onto our trajectory. What puzzled me most was the fact that in the past I'd come to look upon Lancelot Biggs as something of a genius; the kind of guy who could pull rabbits out of a hat. Like the time he rescued our ship from Runt Hake and his pirate crew.[3] But now Biggs seemed to have gone into a complete funk; a wan and stubborn silence as to his reasons for having given up the battle. [Footnote 3: Fantastic Adventures, February, 1940.--Ed.] Well, it was his business; not mine. He'd buttered his bread--now let him lie in it! I looked at the clock once more. Nine hours had elapsed; a little more than that. So I sauntered back to the bridge. Everyone up there was in a fine state of the jitters--except Mr. Biggs and Diane. With fine disregard for those about them, they were curled up together on a chart-table reading poetry! Cap Hanson had gnawed his fingernails down to the second knuckle. Dick Todd was pacing the floor like a captive wild-cat. I said, meekly enough, "Mr. Biggs--the ten hours is almost up." "Mmmm!" said Lancelot Biggs. Cap Hanson turned on him savagely. "Well! Well, do something! And you, Diane, I'm ashamed of you! Sitting here with that--that nincompoop's head draped all over your shoulder!"