Because it alone possessed the required outside force spoken of in Newton’s “Universal Laws.”
And it was doing fine.
Dinner was being served in the dining room. A group of shapely girls added grace to the swimming pool on the promenade deck. The bar was filled with a merry crowd which in turn were partly filled with liquor. A man in uniform, the Second Officer, was throwing darts with a few passengers in the playroom, and there were four oldish ladies on sabbatical leave who were stricken with mal-de-void.
The passage up to now had been uneventful. A meteor or two had come to make the ship swing a bit—but the swerve was less than the pitch of an ocean vessel in a moderate sea and it did not continue as did an ocean ship. Most of the time the Empress of Kolain seemed as steady as solid r
