Nor made the Jovians any effort to conceal that which was being done aboard the _Liberty_. They worked openly, their engineers offering painstaking explanations of the device's operation to those who cared to learn. And, of course this number was great. Almost all the _Liberty's_ personnel was eager to learn the secret of that novel flight method which was to henceforth govern their ship. As the sublime simplicity of the plan revealed itself physicists and spacemen alike were awed. "Not so much," said Captain Hugh Warren wonderingly, "at the method itself as at the fact that nobody ever thought of it before. Why, when you hear it explained it's like child's play!" Dr. Bryant smiled thinly. "And is that not always true of great inventions? The wheel, the steam engine, the gasoline motor, the rocket drive--all these things seemed simple commonplaces to the civilizations which used them. But each was, to a former civilization which knew it not, a mystery at once profound and obscure. So it is with the Jovian fourth-dimensional drive. "I venture to predict that in the future days--if, that is, we successfully accomplish our mission--it will become the standard method of space travel. Its advantages are obvious. Instantaneous transfer of objects from one spot to another ... why, just think! Tomorrow's earthman may eat for breakfast fresh budberries plucked that morning from the marshes of Venus, covered with milk shipped short hours ago from a Martian dairy ranch!" "All of which," said the little steward, Herby Hawkins apologetically, "sounds mighty good, guv'nor. And maybe this here now device is, like you say, child's play. But--beggin' your pardon, sir--I still don't get it. 'Ow can a ship get so fast from one plyce to another? Almost like it was in two plyces at the same time?" "Why," explained Dr. Bryant professorially, "simply by contracting into contigual adjacency two _loci_ of the continuum--" * * * * * "Excuse me a minute, Doctor," grinned Gary. "Maybe I can explain it in a way Hawkins will understand more easily. You see, Hawkins, it's like this. I draw two circles on this piece of paper--" He sketched rapidly--"Now, let us suppose you are a two-dimensional creature living in this universe, which we will call 'Flatland.' You are on _this_ world and you wish to travel to _that_ one. How would you go about it?" "Naturally," said Hawkins, "this way." And he drew his finger laterally between the two "worlds." "A stryte line bein' the shortest distance between two points--"