At Dr. Mallory's suggestion, I did not tell my men too much about our plans. "With so much at stake, O'Shea," he said, "the less they know the better it will be." But they did not ask to know much. They were good men; they trusted me. And if they chafed a little at the enforced idleness of the next week, the rest must have been a welcome surcease from months of fighting. Only one man failed to share their calm acceptance of my orders. Krassner. He told me, sulkily, "There's something going on around here, O'Shea. And, damn it, I have a right to know what it is. As a fellow officer--" "I respect your brevet, Krassner," I told him somewhat curtly, "but for the present I must ask you to remember that you are attached to this division through courtesy only, and have no authority. In a few more days, now, I will be at liberty to explain everything." He had to be satisfied with that. Though it was the nature of the man to be snoopy; several times he was observed prowling around the grounds, searching some clue as to Doctor Mallory's well-concealed secret. He was chasing a will-o'-the-wisp, of course. A man might have searched for months without finding the entrance to Mallory's underground workshops. Mallory admitted Wilson and St. Cloud, my lieutenants, to his confidence. He took us to the cavern wherein was being constructed the spaceship. The gateway to the depths was that which appeared to be a photographer's dark-room. Once inside, Mallory pressed certain carved ornaments, the entire farther wall slid back, and there stretched before us a smooth, well-lighted passage leading downward at a gentle incline. We must have followed this more than a half mile before we debouched into the main cavern; a mighty, vaulted chamber, a huge bubble of emptiness blown in the solid mountain centuries ago when Earth was in the travail of making. But it was not this natural wonder that made me gasp. I had seen others; I had, indeed, once taken refuge for four weeks with the Ninth Artillery in Luray. That which brought an exclamation to my lips was the shimmering monster braced on an exoskeleton of girders in the middle of the chamber. A gigantic, tear-shaped rocketship, stern jets lifted some feet off the ground, streamlined nose pointing at the roof of the cave. About it, in and around it, sweating men fretted, worried, labored, like so many restless bees. Here the brief chatter of a riveting machine woke snarling echoes as a final plate was welded into place; there a master electrician wove an intricate network of wires into some obscure purpose. In still another place, a strong-thewed gang trundled seemingly endless trains of supplies into the ship's capacious holds. Dr. Mallory smiled at the expressions on our faces, and there was pardonable pride in his smile. "There, my friends," he said quietly, "is the _Jefferson_." "_Jefferson?_" repeated Maureen wonderingly.