Just as we were finishing our coffees, Lahoma Rice, the secretary in the Dean's office, came in and discovered us. Mallory and I had been more or less competing for her affections for some time. It was the only thing that had ever come between us in our years at college together and the years since then. We both tried to keep it on a friendly basis, but underneath it had become pretty serious. When we saw her coming Jud whispered quickly, "Keep quiet about all this in front of her. We don't want anybody to know about our amazing discovery at this early date." Coming over, she slid into the booth beside Jud and flashed a smile at me and Mallory. "Well, what's all the hush-hush about?" "Oh, nothing," answered Mallory, looking completely unconcerned. "Ha, ha. That's right. Absolutely nothing at all," I echoed, to make it more convincing. But somehow it didn't sound quite as convincing as I had intended. Even I noticed that at once, and a secret dangled before the nose of a woman. It awoke in her an undefeatable urge. Before we could rally our forces she was in on the secret and determined to go with us when we went to Mars. "But Lahoma," Mallory desperately pleaded, "you don't need to come along. I'll be all right." "I wasn't thinking of you," Lahoma retorted icily, and although she did not look at me as she said that, my heart quickened its tempo at the hidden inference in her words. So it was settled. The four of us were to go as soon as school let out the next summer. During the winter Mallory and I would build the space ship in the old boat house down on the beach just a few blocks from the campus. * * * * * It was really fun that winter, working late into the night putting the space ship together. Our crowning achievement was retractible wings for steering the ship in atmosphere. In space, of course, steering would have to be done by small steering rockets. The main drive force, though, would be the missing link, as we had been calling it all winter. Came the spring, as somebody in the English department might say, and the ship was complete. During the spring months we used the last of our joint resources to stock it with all sorts of things, including seeds for planting, in case we could not get back, or didn't want to come back. Our final load, at the end of the school year, was books. Nothing but books, and literally tons of them on everything from languages to philosophy, from farming to the Bessemer Process. Then we were ready. During the winter we had all read everything we could get on interplanetary travel. Most of it was, of course, fiction, but each author had his own little idea that we could consider, so that by the time we were ready to shove off we had a fairly complete grasp of every problem we could possibly encounter--or so we fondly hoped.