I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Canaveral and the GEO. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I thus duly arrived in Kennedy Transorbital. It was a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the packet for Wôpanâak had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of spacewhaling stop at this same Kennedy Transorbital, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Wôpanâak craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old beltclaim, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though Kennedy has of late been gradually monopolising the Sol business of spacewhaling, and though in this matter poor old Wôpanâak is now much behind her, yet Wôpanâak was her great original—the Tyre of this Carthage;—the place where the first dead Solar spacewhale was stranded. Where else but from Wôpanâak did those rebel spacewhalemen, the Pallor-Men, first sally out in skiffs to give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Wôpanâak, too, did that first adventurous little shuttle put forth, partly laden with simple debris—so goes the story—to launch at the spacewhales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a missile from the bow-launcher?

Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in Kennedy, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal set of corridors where there were not laws against me, acrid in smell and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few credits,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary hallway shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south—wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don’t be too particular.

With halting steps I paced the corridors, and passed the sign of “The Crossed Missiles”—but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the “Voidfish Inn,” there came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have cleared the very graffiti from before the demesne, for everywhere else the layered prose lay an inch thick on a hard, asphaltic gripway,—rather weary for me, when I struck my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in the corridor, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don’t you hear? get away from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct followed the turns that took me spaceward, for there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary corridors! blocks of blackness, not houses on either hand, and here and there a passage-light, like a candle hung about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of the station proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide adjoinment, the bulkhead of which stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an ash-box in the clear-space. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But “The Crossed Missiles,” and “The Voidfish?”—this, then must needs be the sign of “The Trap.” However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within, pushed on and opened a second, interior bulkhead.

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It seemed the great Evangelical Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred waspish faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a pallid Angel of The Immanent was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a premillennialist church; and the preacher’s text was about the fire and brimstone of the Beyond, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the sign of ‘The Trap!’

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docking bays, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a faded sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of glowing exhaust, and these words underneath—“The Spouter Inn:—Peter Coffin.”

Coffin?—Spouter?—Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Wôpanâak, they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the worn little bulkhead itself looked as if it might have been installed here from the ruins of some burnt shuttle, and as the dilapidated sign had a poverty-stricken set of cracks in it, I thought that here was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pseudo-coffee.

It was a queer sort of place—a gable-ended old affix-hab, one side palsied as it were, and warped all over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak bend, where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling through the ducts than ever it did about poor Paul’s tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-hab, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. “In judging of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon,” says an old writer—of whose works I possess the only copy extant—“it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out a sealed airlock where the void is all on the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where the void is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier.” True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind—old black-letter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his red silken wrapper—(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out that frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-spacewhaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the rust from yon weathered gate, and see what sort of a place this “Spouter” may be.