“Lounge,” said Andresen. “Control center’s right under our feet; reverse gravity.” He pressed a stud on the wall and a section of the floor slid back. “You’ll have to flip,” he warned, and did a head-first dive into the hole.

Donal, who knew what to expect, followed the J. C.’s example. The momentum of his dive shot him through and into another circular chamber of the same size as the lounge, in which everything would have been upside down and nailed to the ceiling, except for the small fact that here the gravity was reversed; and what had been down, was up, and up was down instead.

“Here,” said Andresen, as Donal landed lightly on the floor at one side of the opening, “is our Control Eye. As you probably saw when you were moving in to come aboard, the Class 4J is a ball-and-hammer ship.” He pressed several studs and in the large globe floating in the center of the floor, that which he had referred to as the Control Eye, a view formed of their craft, as seen from some little distance outside the ship. Half-framed against the star-pricked backdrop of space, and with just a sliver of the curved edge of Freiland showing at the edge of the scene, she floated. A sphere thirty meters in diameter, connected by two slim shafts a hundred meters each in length to a rhomboid-shape that was the ship’s thrust unit, some five meters in diameter at its thickest and looking like a large child’s spinning top, pivoted on two wires that clamped it at the middle. This was the “hammer.” The ship, proper, was the “ball.”

“No phase-shift equipment?” asked Donal. He was thinking of the traditional cylinder shape of the big ships that moved between the stars.

“Don’t fool yourself,” answered Andresen. “The grid’s there. We just hope the enemy doesn’t see it, or doesn’t hit it. We can’t protect it, so we try to make it invisible.” His finger stabbed out to indicate the apparently bare shafts. “There’s a covering grid running the full length of the ship, from thrust to nose. Painted black.”

Donal nodded thoughtfully.

“Too bad a polarizer won’t work in the absence of atmosphere,” he said.

“You can say that,” agreed Andresen. He flicked off the Eye. “Let’s look around the rest of the ship by hand.”

He led out a door and down a passage similar to the one by which they had entered the lounge. They came out into a corridor that was the duplicate of the curving one they had passed in the other half of the ship.