Nothing happened except vertigo and nausea and the feeling of falling in a spiral fashion toward nowhere at all. The Glamorgan was again in overdrive. The little man came in, brushing off his hands.

“That’s the way,” he said truculently, “to handle this ship!” Link scribbled a memo of the instant the Glamorgan had gone into overdrive.

“In two days, four hours, thirty-three minutes and twenty seconds,” he observed, “we’ll want to break out again. We ought to be somewhere near Sord, then.”

“If,” said Thistlethwaite suspiciously, “if you’re not tryin’ to put something over on me!”

Link shrugged. He’d begun to wonder, lately, why he’d come on this highly mysterious journey. In one sense he’d had good reason. Jail. But now he began to be restless. He wore a stake-belt next to his skin, and in it he had certain small crystals. There were people who would murder him enthusiastically for those crystals. There were others who would pay him very large sums for them. The trouble was that he had no specific idea of what he wanted to do with a large sum. Small sums, yes. He could relax with them. But large ones—He felt a need for the pleasingly unexpected. Even the exciting.

One day passed and he was definitely impatient. He was bored. He couldn’t even think of anything to write in the log book. There’d been a girl about whom he’d felt romantic, not so long ago. He tried to think sentimentally about her. He failed. He hadn’t seen her in months and she was probably married to somebody else now. The thought didn’t bother him. It was annoying that it didn’t. He craved excitement and interesting happenings, and he was merely heading for a planet that hadn’t made authenticated contact with the rest of the galaxy in two hundred years, and then had promised to shoot anybody who landed. He was only in a leaky ship whose machinery broke down frequently and might at any time burn out.