machinery was finished in a hurry and done right. However, when it came
to fitting the outfit into a suitable sky-car, Kinney was obliged to
call in an architect. That accounts for E. Williams Jackson. At the same
time, it occurred to the doctor that they would need a cook. Mrs. Kinney
had refused to have anything whatever to do with the trip, and so Kinney
put an ad in the paper. As luck would have it, Van Emmon, the geologist,
who had learned how to cook when he first became a mountaineer, saw the
ad and answered it in hope of adventure.

The doctor himself, besides his training in the mental and bodily
frailities of human beings, had also an unusual command of the related
sciences, such as biology. Smith's specialties have already been named;
he could drive an airplane or a nail with equal ease. Van Emmon, as a
part of his profession, was a skilled "fossilologist," and was well up
in natural history.

As for E. Williams Jackson--the architect was also the sociologist of
the four. Moreover, he had quite a reputation as an amateur antiquarian.
Nevertheless, the most important thing about E. Williams Jackson was not
learned until after the visit to Mercury, after the terrible end of that
exploration, after the architect, falling in a faint, had been revived
under the doctor's care.

"Gentlemen," said Kinney, coming from the secluded nook among the
dynamos which had been the architect's bunk; "gentlemen, I must inform
you that Jackson is not what we thought.

"He--I mean, she--is a woman!"

Which put an entirely new face upon matters. The three men, discussing