Afterward, when everyone had stopped trying to talk at once, and a modicum of coherence worked its way into our glad reunion, I pressed Biggs for explanations. He grinned in that amiable, modest way of his.
"Why, it wasn't much, really, Sparks," he protested. "I never was lost in hyper-space, of negative space, at all! You see, when I cut myself loose in the life-skiff from the 'infinite mass' of the Saturn, in order to reestablish the ship's finiteness, I also made my own craft finite again. Which is pure common sense. Anything less than infinite is necessarily finite—"
"Comes the dawn," I groaned. "And I like to think I've got brains. But go on!"
"Well, by sheer accident, the spot in space where I became finite again happened to be here. On the surface of Jupiter. I was pretty much surprised, as you can guess, to learn that this is a definitely habitable planet. Good air, plenty of food and water—no handicaps but its tremendous bulk." He sobered momentarily. "None of the others who ever crashed here survived, I guess," he said. "I've found three or four spaceships, broken to bits—
"Well, anyway—I realized that the only way for me to ever get away was to find some method of counteracting the planet's terrific gravity. And it suddenly occurred to me that the answer lay in a laboratory curiosity created way back in the 20th Century. A piece of magnetized steel that floated within upright supports above a counter-magnetized plate.
"I adapted this principle and gave it a few refinements of my own. The instructions I gave you created a dual-magnet hull for the Saturn. Inner hull positively charged, outer hull negative. Counterbalance, you see. The outside of the ship repelled the gravitational attraction of Jupiter so strongly that it could never have landed. The inner hull tempered the effect of the outer so that an easy, drifting motion was obtained. You could vary the speed of this simply by altering the amount of E.M.F. running through the coils—"
"We discovered that," interrupted the Old Man. "But you still haven't told us, son, about your 'ghost.' You like to scared the almighty hell out of all of us. How—"
Lance grinned shyly.
"Well, I can't take credit for that, Skipper. You see, it was sheer accident. I found a deposit of some strange new substance here on Jupiter with the most peculiar properties. The stuff seems to polarize light at its source—and reorganize it into a tri-dimensional image at a distance which can be controlled by electric power.