The door was barred behind us. We passed along a low, narrow passage, walking on a metal grid of woven wires. I saw small rooms; ladders leading up and down to other levels. A small room, crowded with strange instruments faintly throbbing as though all this wired bundle of mechanism was impatient to be gone. We came to a little room with a window in the concave side of the hull; a table of woven wire; and a few wire chairs. "Sit down," said Drake. "You particularly, Frank--be careful as we start. Your first voyage! The shock is different from the drug. I see you brought the weapons?" "Yes. Do you want them now, Drake?" "Keep them. We'll look them over presently. Sit quiet, Frank." He spoke hurriedly, abstractedly. "We must get started at once." He hastened from the room to give orders for the starting. I had seen some eight or ten men aboard the vehicle. Four were in the instrument control room; Drake went in there. I sat down, with Dianne beside me. Alt was whispering to Ahlma near by. Dianne murmured: "Don't talk now--just for a moment." I sat waiting. This vehicle with its many small rooms; its small passages, gave me again the impression that I was too large for my surroundings. Drake had stooped as he went through the arcade into the adjacent control room. The dark trees showed motionless outside the window. Dianne murmured: "Now, Frank." It was a slow transition. The wire walls of the room turned faintly luminous. They hummed. A dull red glow suffused everything. The wire floor, the ceiling, the chair upon which I was sitting, all glowed red, like wire slowly heating. Red, then yellow, then almost white, with a cast of violet. But my hand on the chair-arm felt it to be cool as before. I was conscious of a slight shock. A lurch. But it was within my head, for the room did not move. Everything was glowing white. Yet the room remained dim, for the light did not radiate. There was a throbbing; a hissing, whining sound of the surging current. Then the air of the room turned electrical. It faintly snapped; occasionally in mid-air, a burst of small blue sparks exploded like a bomb. The outlines of the walls and ceiling and the furniture were lit with tiny blue lightnings. Then I felt the real shock. A swoop of all my senses; a second, in which I thought I was gone, falling, with only the consciousness of Dianne's firm hand holding me. A moment, then the shock was passed. I steadied, and found that save for a queer lightness and a tingling, I felt no different from before. Dianne murmured: "That's all, Frank; you're past it." "Yes. Have we started?" "Oh, yes." Drake came back. He eyed me appraisingly, but made no comment. He sat beside us.