“Come with me,” Babe said, “and let’s get you started as a steward. You can bunk in my extra cot. There was an odd number of men this trip, leaving the spare bed.” Babe locked the door of Mr. Bowers’ suite so that no one would be curious about him. He told Jim that Mr. Bowers very rarely mixed with the passengers or crew. For this reason he would not likely be missed. Babe kept Jim out of sight of the other crewmen and hurriedly got him fitted into a steward’s white uniform. “Your job will be to show the tourists how to get along in the space ship,” Babe told him. Jim went around with Babe to learn the ropes. Some of the steward’s friends looked at Jim curiously and asked about him. Babe satisfied them by saying that Jim was a last-minute addition. The first jobs Jim and Babe had to take care of were several cases of space sickness. Lack of gravity did funny things to the balancing mechanism in the ear and often made amateur space travelers feel as though they were coming apart. A dose of medicine usually fixed them up. Jim was glad that he himself did not suffer from this affliction. Jim watched Babe instruct a gentleman how to take a nap without using a couch. The only thing the man needed was a short cord secured to his ankle and to a ring on the compartment wall to make sure that his breathing did not cause him to float off. For night sleeping, Jim was told, most people preferred using the standard sleeping-bag-type cots. “How about some lunch?” Babe asked Jim when they had left the passenger relaxing in mid-air. “We’ll have to get ours before the tourists come in.” “I’m all for it,” Jim replied. As they “swam” toward the crewmen’s mess, Babe said, “This is your crucial meal, Jim. If you get by this one without anyone getting curious about you, I don’t believe you’ll have to worry about them anymore.” “I have my fingers crossed.” He was going to need all the luck he could get, he realized, as they navigated into the mess compartment. Across the room from them was the officer with the square red mustache who had spoken to him as he carried Mr. Bowers’ bags into Suite 8! Jim whispered to Babe about the officer. Babe told him that there was a good chance of avoiding him, since the officers sat at one table and the stewards at another. Jim was fascinated by his first meal in space. Everyone strapped himself to his seat so that he would stay put. Then the cooks brought in individual plates which adhered to the metallic table top by magnetism. Each bite of food was impaled on a toothpick stuck into a sponge-rubber mat which was fastened to the plate. As Jim ate with tongs and sucked his drink from a closed container, he was careful to avoid the roving eyes of the officer with the red mustache. Jim was glad that the other stewards weren’t inquisitive about him. They appeared hungry and weren’t talkative.