In the wildest imagination never was such a spaceship pictured as went wabbling up from before Bud Gregory’s shack by Puget Sound. It was shapeless and ungainly. It bulged with its layers of exterior insulation. It had no bow and no stern. It had no streamlined rocket-tubes, no gyros, no neat and efficient instrument-board.
The ship had no control-room or air-lock, there was no space-suit on board and there was literally nothing of the commonly envisioned precision about its design. There was nothing to help in navigation. It was, quite literally, a hot-water tank tumbling and wallowing up toward the sky.
Features on the ground dwindled and were wiped out by increasing distance. The sea seemed to flow beneath, and the mountains to come sliding over the horizon to huddle below. Clouds rac
