"Why, I believe that this ship is open, as I've told you--exposed, unprotected, or whatever you like to call it. I should say it's reasonable to think that all the things of the material world are barred, as it were, from the immaterial; but that in some cases the barrier may be broken down. That's what may have happened to this ship. And if it has, she may be naked to the attacks of beings belonging to some other state of existence." "What's made her like that?" he asked, in a really awed sort of tone. "The Lord knows!" I answered. "Perhaps something to do with magnetic stresses; but you'd not understand, and I don't, really. And, I suppose, inside of me, I don't believe it's anything of the kind, for a minute. I'm not built that way. And yet I don't know! Perhaps, there may have been some rotten thing done aboard of her. Or, again, it's a heap more likely to be something quite outside of anything I know." "If they're immaterial then, they're spirits?" he questioned. "I don't know," I said. "It's so hard to say what I really think, you know. I've got a queer idea, that my head-piece likes to think good; but I don't believe my tummy believes it." "Go on!" he said. "Well," I said. "Suppose the earth were inhabited by two kinds of life. We're one, and _they're_ the other." "Go on!" he said. "Well," I said. "Don't you see, in a normal state we may not be capable of appreciating the _realness_ of the other? But they may be just as _real_ and material to _them_, as _we_ are to _us_. Do you see?" "Yes," he said. "Go on!" "Well," I said. "The earth may be just as _real_ to them, as to us. I mean that it may have qualities as material to them, as it has to us; but neither of us could appreciate the other's realness, or the quality of realness in the earth, which was real to the other. It's so difficult to explain. Don't you understand?" "Yes," he said. "Go on!" "Well, if we were in what I might call a healthy atmosphere, they would be quite beyond our power to see or feel, or anything. And the same with them; but the more we're like _this_, the more _real_ and actual they could grow _to us_. See? That is, the more we should become able to appreciate their form of materialness. That's all. I can't make it any clearer." "Then, after all, you _really_ think they're ghosts, or something of that sort?" Tammy said. "I suppose it does come to that," I answered. "I mean that, anyway, I don't think they're our ideas of flesh and blood. But, of course, it's silly to say much; and, after all, you must remember that I may be all wrong." "I think you ought to tell the Second Mate all this," he said. "If it's really as you say, the ship ought to be put into the nearest port, and jolly well burnt." "The Second Mate couldn't do anything," I replied. "Even if he believed it all; which we're not certain he would."