They must, at any rate, be curious people. The great cylinder was passing over them, and they had a better conception of its size. It was at least twice as big as the 200-foot diameter Kass had estimated, and fully 1500 feet long. A section of its hull slid open, and the scientists felt the tug of mysterious forces on their own little vessel. They drifted up into the opening, knew that the hatch had closed by the shutting out of the solar glare. But there was no lack of light. They could see the welded plates of the hull by an intense saffron light that came from oval plates set in the wall. More of the gravity buttons were ranged around the room. It appeared that they were regularly used in handling freight. Now, as the little captive ship was tugged here and there, the prisoners could see flashes of that penetrating lavender light that seemed somehow solid. "Get ready, men!" Sine said, breaking off his absorbed contemplation of their surroundings. "Strap on your belts, and be sure your disintegrator tubes are in their clips." Lents was already lifting his toga and snapping his weapon belt around his ample waist. A mere strip of flexible metal with pockets for the atobombs and a clip for the delicate little tube--it might easily be taken for a mere ornamental article of apparel. "Hope they're friendly," Kass remarked, patting the buckle shut over his flat diaphragm, "but if they aren't we can give 'em a thing or two to think about." The quartz ports, kept free from frost on the inside by a curtain of hot dry air blown over them through a slit, suddenly misted over on the outside, became opaque with a milky glaze of frost. This told the prisoners that their captors were "bleeding" air into the hold, which did double duty as an airlock. They heard vague clanging of metal on metal, transmitted to them through the hull of their ship. Then a sharp blade scraped away the ice from one of the ports, and a face peered in. They looked at one another for a few moments, these cousins of the human race, separated by 200,000 years of time and impassable meteor-strewn wastes of space. The man at the port turned and beckoned to others, who also surveyed the prisoners. Then the first one, evidently the chief of this massive space vessel, motioned to the prisoners, to open their manports. "Keep together now!" Sine admonished his companions. "If they act unfriendly we'll let them have the ray. Then you two slip back into your own ship while I grab this vacuum suit out of the lock. With that on I can carve a way out, and disable them, too." "It would be a shame!" Kass said as he whirled the handwheel of the inner manport, "but----" The valve opened, and a few minutes later the three Earthmen stepped out to confront the Jovians.