His voice broke in a great, wrenching sob. Then he lurched from the control room like a broken thing. * * * * * I never saw him again. No one aboard the _Antigone_ ever saw him again. For the next hour we were in a turmoil, rearranging the electrical units of the ship as Cartaphilus had told us. We finished our task just in time; scant seconds after we had thrown on the power we nosed into the web-like field of force which is the H-layer. It was a breathless moment. Despite our efforts, there was not a man of us but expected a brief, brilliant instant of horror--then oblivion. But we were as wrong as Cartaphilus had been right. There was a jolt as our forcefield met that of Earth's shield; the permalloy hull of the ship sang and hummed and glowed cherry-red under the impact of that terrific electromotive strain, but we slipped through the barrier with greater ease than ever had any ship using the old style shield generators. In our jubilation we quite forgot the mad scientist whose strange, last-minute change of mind had saved our lives. We landed. And sometime between the moment of landing and the moment when we remembered our passenger, he fled. Disappeared completely from the ship and from our lives. Cap McNeally was nothing if not a square-shooter. He refused to take credit for the invention that had brought us through the H-layer. The patent rights were taken out in the name of our deranged passenger. The "Moran H-penetrant" it is called. All spaceships used it until just recently; until Cap Hawkins of the _Andromeda_ and the Venusian scientist, Jar Farges, discovered Ampies could be used as H-layer shields. But afterward, Cap McNeally came to me, wondering. "Why should he have wanted to die, Brait? I can't understand it. A man like John Cartaphilus; wealthy, intelligent, respected--was he really mad, do you think?" I hesitated. I, too, had been wondering about that. I had gone so far as to look up the life history of the mad scientist. I had found several curious things. No man knew when, or where, John Cartaphilus had been born. All agreed that he was "remarkably youthful" in appearance. It was rumored that he had outlived a wife married in youth; that she had been an elderly woman when she died. I said, "I told you there had been a scandal in his life, recently, Skipper. It concerned a friend of his, a worker in one of his shops. "Cartaphilus was, and is, a genius, but he has a reputation for driving his men too hard. They say that on this occasion, seeking the answer to some problem that evaded him, he forced this assistant to labor for weeks, begrudging him even a few hours sleep each night. "On the eve of the solution of the problem, this worker came to him, nervous, ragged, exhausted, begging for a brief respite. Claiming he was sick with overwork and fatigue. But John Cartaphilus insisted, impatiently, there was no time for rest. He ordered the man to get about his work.