"Instead of using a lot of keyboards and force-tubes, you simply think into that helmet what you want for dinner and it appears. Think that you want the table cleared and it is cleared--dishes and all simply vanish. Think of anything else you want done around this room and it's done--that's all there is to it. "To relieve your mind I'll explain some more. Mart and I both realized that that Brain could very easily become the most terrible, the most frightfully destructive thing that the universe has ever seen. Therefore, with two exceptions, every controller on this planetoid is of a strictly limited type. Of the two master controls, which are unlimited and very highly reactive, one responds only to Crane's thoughts, the other only to mine. As soon as we get some loose time we are going to build a couple of auxiliaries, with automatic stops against stray thoughts, to break you girls in on--we know as well as you do, Red-Top, that you haven't had enough practice yet to take an unlimited control." "I'll say _I_ haven't!" she agreed feelingly. "I feel lots better now--I'm sure I can handle the rest of these things very nicely." "Sure you can. Well, let's call the Cranes and go into the control room," Seaton suggested. "The quicker we get started the quicker we'll get done." * * * * * Accustomed as she was to the banks and tiers of keyboards, switches, dials, meters, and other operating paraphernalia of the control rooms of the previous _Skylark_, Dorothy was taken aback when she passed through the thick, heavily insulated door into that of the _Skylark of Valeron_. For there were four gray walls, a gray ceiling, and a rugged gray floor. There were low, broad double chairs and headsets. There was nothing else. "This is your seat, Dottie, here beside me, and this is your headset--it's just a visiset, so you can see what is going on, not a controller," he hastened to reassure her. "You have a better illusion of seeing if your eyes are open, that's why everything is neutral in color. But better still for you girls, we'll turn off the lights." The illumination, which had seemed to pervade the entire room instead of emanating from any definite sources, faded out; but in spite of the fact that the room was in absolute darkness Dorothy saw with a clarity and a depth of vision impossible to any Earthly eyes. She saw at one and the same time, with infinite precision of detail, the houses and their contents; the whole immense sphere of the planetoid, inside and out; Valeron and her sister planets encircling their sun; and the stupendous full sphere of the vaulted heavens. She knew that her husband was motionless at her side, yet she saw him materialize in the control room of _Skylark Two_. There he seized the cabinet which contained the space chart of the Fenachrone--that library of films portraying all the Galaxies visible to the wonderfully powerful telescopes and projectors of that horrible race.