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sometimes it ran on for miles along singing silver trackways in the empty aether, and once, another train went by, roaring upside down along the underside of the same track, like our reflection. What could be more fascinating than to be whisked through the open aether aboard a speeding railway train?
    Well, quite a few things, actually. Train travel in space is all very well while one is passing through a great asteroidal hub like the Modesty and Decorum clump, where worlds cluster thick and railway lines run alongside one’s own, and entwine with each other like strands of spaghetti. But after a few hours we were out in the nether reaches, where the only things to see were mined-out rocks, dead, sere and drab, and even those were few and far between.
    Somewhere nearby, back in 1804, Admiral Nelson had fought a famous battle against the aether-ships of some rebel Americans, and I looked out hopefully for the drifting wreckage of their flagship, the USSS Liberty , which had never been found. Naturally, I did not see anything nearly so romantic. Now and again I glimpsed a shoal of aetheric icthyomorphs, but they were small and far away, all the bigger forms having been hunted to extinction, or scared off by the trains. (The days when daring railway passengers used to roll down their carriage windows and take pot-shots at passing shoals of giant space jellyfish and aetheric manatee are long gone, worse luck!)
    Mother, who has the knack of sleeping anywhere, was soon napping. Even Myrtle fell into a snooze, in which she sometimes murmured Jack Havock’s name in a martyredfashion. But I could not sleep, and I sat watching my own reflection in the trembling crystal of the window, and feeling my posterior become more and more benumbed.

    At last the train began to slow, and the auto-guard came stumping along the corridor and slid open the door of our compartment to announce, ‘Next stop, Starcross Halt.’ We traversed a last, dark, echoey tunnel through the heart of a mined-out boulder called Scarcity, and I watched my own reflection in the window and waited wide-eyed for my first glimpse of Starcross.
    ‘There!’ cried Mother, just as eager as I, kneeling at the window as the train shot out from the shadows of the tunnel. Even Myrtle raised her head a little.
    Ahead we could see the end of the line, a tiny world of reddish mountains with deserts of pale sand flashing in the starlight. I felt a great wave of excitement, and then, almost at once, a wave of disappointment even greater. I could see the roof of a small station, but precious little else. Starcross was just another old mining asteroid pitted with ugly craters. A few spindly aether-trees clung to the uninviting crags, while here and there some fragment of old pithead winding gear jutted up like a gibbet. Where was Sir Waverley’s hotel? I wondered. For the only building I could see, apart from the station itself, was the ruin of some old mine-owner’s mansion, which stood among the spoil-heaps, stark white and empty windowed, like a gigantic skull.

Chapter Three

    We Arrive at the Grand Hotel and Are Made Welcome by Its Mysterious Proprietor.
    ‘O h, I declare!’ cried Myrtle, as the train bore us down a last long curve towards that dismal world, with its lonely cluster of station buildings. ‘We have been practised upon! Mr Titfer’s invitation was but a foolish prank, and we have come all this way for nought!’
    I was inclined to agree. Even Mother seemed downcast. Then I looked again at the grim mansion, and saw that I had ‘been mistaken. Some trick of the light – some passing haze or optical illusion – had made it look a perfect ruin. Indeed, it still seemed to have a hazy, wavering, insubstantial look. But an instant later it stood out sharp and solid, and I could not understand how I had been deceived. It was no ruin at all, but rather a grand, elegant building, standing on a curved sweep of promenade which overlooked one of those dry, dead basins