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Again it was Sam’s duty to explain. “Don’t let the Shark bother you. He means well, but he’s a bug on mathematics—and cones, and circles, and cubes, and spheres, and—er—er—and all that sort of thing. But he’s harmless.”

Once more Varley’s laugh saved the situation. “I understand. And he’s right, at that. What I meant was, that the thing was egg-shaped—almost, but not quite. And that little difference in shape, the inventor figured, was just what would make it a perpetual motion machine, that would keep going forever, once you started it. Of course, it didn’t work. But I say!”—he was looking straight at the Shark—“I say! If you’re up in the ‘math’ I envy you. It’s my stumbling-block—gets me every time.”

“Umph!” said the Shark non-committally. In his experience the world was strangely crowded with beings woefully deficient in the mathematical sense. He was learning to make allowances for their shortcomings. The visitor, by frank confession of incapacity, won a degree of toleration, if not of approval.