I got it. I groaned. That's the trouble with Lance Biggs' logic. Once you hear it explained, it always looks so easy!

I said, "A convection oven!"

"Why, yes! It's a heating principle invented by Dr. Abbot 'way back in the Twentieth Century. A large, curved reflector—in this case the hull of the Saturn—concentrates the Sun's rays on a layer of black oil. A container, highly evacuated, retains all the heat thus formed, raising the temperature of the 'oven' to almost any desired height." Biggs grinned. "Our problem was not the heating of the ship. That was a cinch. Our only hard job was convincing Gilchrist that we must change our course before we got too hot."

Cap Hanson nodded sagely.

"An' your 'space-oven' worked fine, son," he acknowledged. "But they's still one thing I don't understand. The pressure. This ship's equipped with artificial gravs an' all them things. But I distinctly felt the Sun's gravs grab hold of us. That's when I got the willies."

Biggs said modestly, "You can thank Sparks for that, too. He did it when he jammed the condensation valves. Made the moisture-content of the ship's atmosphere rise. The grav plates, being electrical by nature, short-circuited. Thus we were all subjected to an extreme 'gravitational attraction' which was the direct result of a capacity overload—but which under the odd circumstances every one naturally attributed to the Sun's proximity." He smiled faintly. "You might say it wasn't the heat—it was the humidity!"

Which sage—if time-worn—observation was the last comment our insanely sensible First Officer would offer on the case of Major Gilchrist vs. The-Rest-of-Us. And since the efficiency expert withdrew into his shell and stayed there for the rest of the trip, nothing more happened to disturb the peace and tranquillity of ye goode shippe Saturn that voyage.

So Biggs is back! A slightly older, slightly wiser, definitely more conventional Biggs, now that he's a married man with responsibilities. And after all the messes his crack-pot ideas have got us into in the past, I guess we all ought to be glad he has settled down.

But—I don't know. Married or not, Biggs is Biggs. And wherever his gangling frame intrudes itself, things have a way of happening. For instance, next month the Saturn is taking off for Uranus on a simple, ordinary cargo trip. On the face of it, it looks like smooth sailing. But Biggs is back on the bridge. And—