Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned steel wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the lamp shutters towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over a line of three blue, dim circles floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic voidfish? even the great stellar leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist’s design seemed this: a final theory of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Horn Vortexer in a great superluminal hurricane; the half-foundered spaceship weltering there with its three dismantled greatmasts alone visible; and an exasperated spacewhale, purposing to up-shift clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish array of monstrous plasma cannon capacitors and dumbfire deliverers. Some were thickly set with glittering electronics resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of copper coil; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast mounting point sweeping round like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous rocket-jockey and belter could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with these were rusty old spacewhaling plasma lance cartridges and missile housing pieces all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long lanceshot, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill a fifteen mile whale between a duck and a drop. And that missile casing—so like a corkscrew now—was shot in Javan System, and run away with by a whale, years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco’s grav-limit. The original steel entered nigh the aft, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man, travelled full forty miles, and at last was found imbedded in the exhauster.

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Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way—cut through what in old times must have been a great central access tube with interfaces all round—you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such low ponderous ceilings above, and such old corrugated iron beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft’s cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when the ventilation ducts groaned so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities gathered from this home system’s remotest nooks. Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den—the bar—a rude attempt at a right spacewhale’s head. Be that how it may, there stands the vast arched bone of a spacewhale’s single intake rib, so wide, a shuttle might almost fly beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters, bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another cursed Joan (by which name indeed they called her), bustles a little withered old woman, who, for their money, dearly sells the spacers deliriums and death.

Abominable are the tumblers into which she pours her poison. Though true cylinders without—within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a centicredit; to this a cen more; and so on to the full glass—the Vortex’s measure, which you may gulp down for a tenthcredit.

Upon entering the place I found a number of young spacers gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of stellshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a room, received for answer that his hab was full—not a bunk unoccupied. “But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a missileer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-spacewhalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”

I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the missileer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the missileer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange station on so empty a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.

“I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?—you want supper? Supper’ll be ready directly.”