"Say, that is a nice proposition!" laughed Fuller. "Then we'll be accompanied by those ghosts all the way? There goes the spirit 'nine fathoms deep' which moves the ship—the ghosts that work the sails. This will be a real Ancient Mariner trip!"
It was like that famed voyage in another way, too. The men found little to do as they passed on at high speed through the vast realm of space. The chronometer pointed out the hours with exasperating slowness. The six hours that were to elapse before the first stop seemed as many days. They had thought of this trip as a wonderful adventure in itself, but the soundless continued monotony was depressing. They wandered around, aimlessly. Wade tried to sleep, but after lying strapped in his bunk for half an hour, he gave up in despair.
Arcot saw that the strain of doing nothing was not going to be good for his little crew and decided to see what could be done about it.
He went down to the laboratory and looked for inspiration. He found it.
"Hey! Morey! Wade! Fuller! Come on down here! I've got an idea!" he called.
They came to find him looking meditatively at the power pack from one of the flying suits he had designed. He had taken the lux metal case off and was looking at the neat apparatus that lay within.
"These are equipped for use with the space suits, of course," Morey pointed out, "and that gives us protection against gases. But I wonder if we might install protection against mechanical injury—with intent to damage aforethought! In other words, why not equip these suits with a small invisibility apparatus? We have it on the ship, but we might need personal protection, too."
"Great idea," said Wade, "provided you can find room in that case."
"I think we can. We won't need to add anything but a few tuning devices, really, and they don't take a whale of a lot of power."
Arcot pointed out the places where they could be put; also, he replaced some of the old induction coils with one of his new storage cells and got far higher efficiency from the tubes.