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"All set."
"Very well, my friends. Let us commence."
They were fed into two ordinary microwire speakers, rigged in parallel. Seated at a control panel for
synchronizing the fragmented message latent in the two wires was a worried-looking man wearing
earphones Mr. Costello. The steel spider threads started very slowly through and a highpitched
gabbling came out of the horn. There were very rapid momentary interruptions, like high frequency code.
"Not in synch," announced Mr. Costello. "Rewind."
An operator sitting in front of him said, "I hate to rewind, Jim. These wires would snap if you breathed
on them."
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"So you break a wire Sir Isaac will splice it. Rewind!"
"Maybe you've got one in backwards."
"Shut up and rewind."
Presently the gabbling resumed. To Don it sounded the same as before and utterly meaningless, but Mr.
Costello nodded. "That's got it. Was it recorded from the beginning?"
Don heard Joe's Texas accents answering, "In the can!"
"Okay, keep it rolling and start playing back the recording. Try slowing the composite twenty to one."
Costello threw a switch; the gabbling stopped completely although the machines continued to unreel the
invisible threads. Shortly a human voice came out of the loudspeaker horn; it was deep, muffled,
dragging, and almost unintelligible. Joe stopped it and made an adjustment, started over. When the voice
resumed it was a clear, pleasant, most careful enunciated contralto.
"Title," the voice said, " 'Some Notes on the Practical Applications of the Horst-Milne Equations. Table
of Contents: Part One On the Design of Generators to Accomplish Strain-Free Molar Translation. Part
Two The Generation of SpaceTime Discontinuities, Closed, Open, and Folded. Part Three On the
Generation of Temporary Pseudo-Acceleration Loci. Part One, Chapter One Design Criteria for a
Simple Generator and Control System. Referring to equation seventeen in Appendix A, it will be seen
that ' "
The voice flowed on and on, apparently tireless. Don was interested, intensely so, but he did not
understand it. He found himself growing sleepy when the voice suddenly rapped out: "Facsimile!
Facsimile! Facsimile!"
Costello touched a switch, stopping the voice, and demanded, "Cameras ready?"
"Hot and rolling!"
"Shift!"
They watched the picture build up a wiring diagram, Don decided it must be-or else a plate of
spaghetti. When the picture was complete the voice resumed.
After more than two hours of this, broken only by desultory conversation, Don turned to Isobel. "I'm not
doing any good here and I'm certainly not learning anything. What do you say we leave?"
"Suits."
They went down the ramp and headed for a tunnel that led toward living quarters. On the way they ran
into Phipps, his face glowing with happiness. Don nodded and started to push on past; Phipps stopped
him. "I was just going to hunt you up."
"Me?"
"Yes. I thought you might want this for a souvenir." He held out the ring.
Don took it and examined it curiously. There was a very tiny break in one branch of the "H" where the
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enamel had been eaten away. The framing circle was an empty, slightly shadowed groove, a groove so
narrow and shallow that Don could hardly catch his fingernail in it.
"You've no more use for it?"
"It's squeezed dry. Keep it. You'll be able to sell it to a museum some day, for a high price."
"No," said Don. "I reckon I'll deliver it to my father eventually."
XVII - To Reset the Clock
Don moved out of the Gargantuan chambers he had been given and in with the other humans. Sir Isaac
would have let him stay until the Sun grew cold, monopolizing an acre or so of living space, but to Don it
seemed not only silly for one person to clutter up chambers built big enough for dragons but not entirely
comfortable so much open space made a man tuned to bush fighting uneasy.
The human guests occupied one dragon apartment with the great rooms partitioned off into cubicles.
They shared its wallowing trough as a plunge bath and had a communal mess. Don roomed with Dr.
Roger Conrad, a tall and shaggy young man with a perpetual grin. Don was a bit surprised to find that
Conrad was held in high esteem by the other scientists.
He saw very little of his roommate, nor of any of the others even Isobel was busy with clerical work.
The team worked night and day with driving intensity. The ring had been opened and they had
engineering data to work from, true but that task force was already swinging toward Mars. Nobody
knew nobody could know whether or not they could finish in time to save their colleagues.
Conrad had tried to explain it to Don one night late as he was turning in. "We don't have adequate
facilities here. The instructions were conceived in terms of Earth and Mars-type techniques. The
dragons do things differently. We've got mighty little of our own stuff and it's hard to jury-rig what we
need from their stuff. The original notion was to install the gear in you know those little jumpbug ships
that people use to get around in on Mars?"
"Seen pictures of them."
"Never actually seen 'em myself. Useless as rocketships, of course, but they are pressurized and big
enough. Now we've got to adapt for a shuttle." A superstratospheric shuttle "with its ears trimmed" the
spreading glider wings unshipped and carried away waited in a covered bayou outside Sir Isaac's
family seat. It would make the trip to Mars if it could be prepared. "It's a headache," he added.
"Well, can we do it?"
"We'll have to do it. We can't possibly do the design calculations over again; we don't have the
machines, even if we had time to re-engineer the job which we haven't."
"That's what I meant. Will you finish in time?"
Conrad sighed. "I wish I knew."
The pressure of time sat heavily on all of them. In their mess hall they had set up a large chart showing
Earth, Sun, Venus, and Mars, each in its proper position. At lunch each day the markers were moved
along the scribed orbits, the Earth by one degree, Venus a bit more, Mars by only half a degree and a
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trifle.
A long dotted line curved from a point on Earth's orbit to a rendezvous with Mars-their best estimate of
the path and arrival date of the Federation task force. The departure date was all they knew with
certainty; the trajectory itself and the arrival date were based on the relative positions of the two planets
and what was believed to be the maximum performance of any Federation ship, assuming refueling in
parking orbit around Earth.
For a rocket ship some orbits are possible, some are impossible. A military ship in a hurry would not, of
course, use the economical doubly-tangent ellipse; such a trip from Earth to Mars would require 258
Earth days. But, even using hyperboloids and wasting fuel, there are severe limits to how quickly a
reaction-driven ship can make an interplanetary voyage.
An Earth calendar hung beside the chart; near it was a clock showing Earth Greenwich time. Posted
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