“All right, I’ll try it,” Porky said suddenly. “I’m no coward, if you go and put it that way. Only I sure hope it works.” I patted him on the back. “Good boy. That’s the stuff. Now listen, everybody, this thing will have to be kept absolutely secret, of course.” “Of course--definitely,” Baldy agreed. “We’ll just go ahead and do it and say nothing,” I went on. “The war will be won in a hurry--and why it got won will be the mystery. Who cares, so long as we win it?” Well, we planned the thing for about an hour. It was so simple, though, there really wasn’t much planning to do. We decided that about eleven o’clock that same night, we’d all go quietly down near Coney Island or somewhere and go to work on the first sub that came within Porky’s range. The range was an unknown quantity, of course. But, so far as any of us could figure, there wasn’t any reason why Porky’s astral body couldn’t jump a mile--ten miles, for instance--just as well as from my window down into the street. “Well, let’s go to dinner,” I said at last. “I was thinking I would take Lisbeth to dinner,” Porky said. “Just to talk things over, you know.” He gazed at Lisbeth with sort of shy confusion I expect you’d call it, and she gazed back. “I’d like that,” Lisbeth said. “Come on, let’s go.” “And you be back here by eleven o’clock promptly,” I warned. “Yes, of course--sure we will,” Porky agreed. “Because the war depends on you.” “Should you go A. W. O. L.,” Baldy put in--and he didn’t smile when he said it--“I will personally see that you get put into an insane asylum for the rest of your natural life.” * * * * * It occurred to me to mention that Porky could jump out of an insane asylum without much trouble, but I decided to keep that thought to myself. Lisbeth and Porky departed with more promises; and Baldy and I had dinner and loafed around discussing the thing, waiting impatiently for eleven o’clock. About quarter past eleven Lisbeth and Porky came back. You’d have thought they might have spent the evening soberly discussing the weird, dangerous things into which Porky was about to plunge. Not at all. They had been to a double-feature movie--“Love’s Lingering,” and “Passion’s Pretty Flowers,” or something like that. They were very happy about it. But they sobered down when I mentioned that Porky had the fate of the war on his hands; and by the time we got down to the seashore Porky was looking a little white around the gills. “I sure hope this thing works,” he said weakly. “Of course it will,” Baldy and I assured him. We sat him down on the sand. It was a lonely stretch, with the waves rolling up in long rhythmic lines of white and the open sea a deep purple with leaden clouds overhead and a wan moon trying to break through. “Now then, make yourself comfortable,” I told Porky as we stretched him out on the sand. “We’ll be right here by you all the time.”