"Then why don't other vessels have them coming aboard?" he said. "How do you account for that?"
"In a way—though sometimes it seems cracky—I think I can, according to my idea," I answered.
"How?" he inquired again.
"Why, I believe that this ship is open, as I've told you—exposed, unprotected, or whatever you like to call it. I should say it's reasonable to think that all the things of the material world are barred, as it were, from the immaterial; but that in some cases the barrier may be broken down. That's what may have happened to this ship. And if it has, she may be naked to the attacks of beings belonging to some other state of existence."
"What's made her like that?" he asked, in a really awed sort of tone.
"The Lord knows!" I answered. "Perhaps something to do with magnetic stresses; but you'd not understand, and I don't, really. And, I suppose, inside of me, I don't believe it's anything of the kind, for a minute. I'm not built that way. And yet I don't know! Perhaps, there may have been some rotten thing done aboard of her. Or, again, it's a heap more likely to be something quite outside of anything I know."
"If they're immaterial then, they're spirits?" he questioned.
"I don't know," I said. "It's so hard to say what I really think, you know. I've got a queer idea, that my head-piece likes to think good; but I don't believe my tummy believes it."
"Go on!" he said.
"Well," I said. "Suppose the earth were inhabited by two kinds of life.
We're one, and they're the other."