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chances.”
    “What if they jump over it?”
    “A person sneaking into a room is more likely to tiptoe than to jump.”
    Miss Schlupe winced as a thump sounded over their heads and the compartment shuddered. “What was that?”
    “Probably they’re loading another compartment. These spaceships are hollow hulks, except for their operation and service sections. The transmitter eliminates the need for corridors and stairs and elevators and such paraphernalia. Passenger compartments are taken aboard as they are engaged, and hooked up to power and ventilation connections. They load freight compartments the same way. We may have tons of freight above us, but that doesn’t matter in weightless space—and a spaceship never ventures where there’s significant gravity. We can be buried in the tail of the ship and still be only a step from the passenger lounge by transmitter.”
    “How long does it take them to get us out of here if the transmitter doesn’t work?”
    Darzek shook his head and dropped onto a chair. It gently shifted to accommodate him, thrust up a protrusion to support his back, spread out to provide a footrest. “Lovely,” he murmured. “I wonder if they call it ‘Interspacial Modern.’”
    Every piece of furniture looked like a monstrous hassock, and certainly contained enough electronic gadgetry to stock a TV repair shop. The chairs could accommodate the posterior or anterior contours of any conceivable life form, at any desired height, and were probably adjustable in ways a human wouldn’t think either necessary or possible. The larger cylinders served as tables or desks, and kept records, recorded financial transactions, sent and received anything from a message to a full-course meal. Darzek would not have been surprised to learn that in private homes they also did the laundry and cared for the children.
    Miss Schlupe seated herself beside him. “I miss my rocking chair,” she grumbled.
    They followed the routine they had become inured to: they studied. Occasionally they practiced ordering food with the service transmitter, but they took most of their meals from the dwindling stock of Earth food. When they tired of study Darzek paced the floor, grappling futilely with the many questions Smith had left unanswered, and resisting the temptation to deplete his stock of cigarettes. Miss Schlupe got out her knitting, and read and reread the stack of confession magazines she’d brought along, accompanying her clicking needles with disapproving clucks of her tongue.
    Smith had recommended that they remain in their compartment, but Darzek, to satisfy his curiosity, made one trip to the ship’s lounge. Several of the life forms he encountered there could not be believed even when seen, and this fact convinced him that galactic civilization was best taken in a long series of extremely small doses until one had built up an immunity to it.
    They experienced no sensation of motion. A transmitter that transmitted itself, the ship moved through space on a series of enormous transmitting leaps, each laboriously calculated. Area-transmitting, Smith called it: it involved a leap to a destination area, carefully selected to avoid suns; as distinguished from point-transmitting, which was used only for limited distances within a solar system, and even then was rarely attempted without a transmitting receiver. The ship’s final transmitting leap would be to the general area of its destination. There it would revert to the clumsy status of an atomic-powered rocket in order to reach its assigned transfer station.
    There were only an Earth day from Primores, the central sun of the galaxy, when Miss Schlupe finally spoke the thought that had been on both their minds since they started.
    “I don’t like it,” she said. “I wish Smith had come along.”
    “Smith was scared silly. Didn’t you notice?”
    She stared at him. “How could you tell?”
    “Various things. He was afraid of the Dark, no pun intended. He was