Helen Platt's voice was sweet, chiding, "You're quite out of character, Mister White. You have to give up the absent-minded math professor this evening. We're all somebody new tonight, you know." Scattered laughter. White looked down. The ex-Latin teacher, heavily made up, had hidden her thinning grey hair under a towering bejewelled turban. "I'm a movie actress and Phil here is a big game hunter," she added, swinging a ruby-shod toe toward a lamp-bronzed man wearing a chalk-white nilene tropojak and encircling crimson commerbund. "Tell us something about yourself and let us guess what kind of secret you've been hiding the last century." White forced a smile. "Not yet," he apologized. "Got to find Elbert Avery first. Quite urgent. Is he around here?" Nobody had seen him, and Jack White, promising abstractedly to come back later and let them "guess him" went on down the room, cautiously avoiding another accident. From circle to cluster he repeated his question with no better success. Several times he was asked why he wanted Avery and twice men of the group offered to help him hunt. To each question, he mumbled something about its not being important--he just wanted to find El Avery for a minute, thanks, and went on toward the orchestra on its stage. As he made his way carefully around the room, peering at dancers, at circles on the other side of the party dusk, he failed to notice the silence behind him. The worried glances which followed him, the half sentences, "Avery this time?" "Overwork...." "Too much for one man...." "... collapsed somewhere?" "... do you suppose?" "... something wrong, definitely...." "Did you see how pale Jack was?" failed to reach him; but more than a quadrant of the hall was aware of his quickened pace when he caught sight of the wiry little man standing against the wall half hidden by the outer edge of one curtain of the stage. * * * * * Elbert Avery was regarding the dancers morosely, his full-dress uniform indicating that he, at least, was sticking to his character as chief astrogator in preference to some more exotic role. As he had expressed it to Samuel Wyckoff when both men went to escort Tim Daneshaw triumphantly to the assembly, "I'm too old to change again. I'm an astrogator now and a 'gator I'll be to the bitter end." Jack White reached him now, spoke in low tones; and both men hurried out a small door at the side of the hall. A sigh seemed to go over the room and conversation rose to a new pitch of animation in a dozen places when it was obvious that Avery was in full control of his wind and limbs. Out in the curving corridor, White took Avery's arm and fairly swept him back to the left, to the elevator. He could hardly speak. "Gyroscope bearings worn on one side ... Powell and North rechecking porthole readings after turnover ... degrees out of course ... miss Venus completely as we're headed ..." he almost babbled.