He threw his pencil across the room and swore. “I don’t get it,” he complained.
“It’s probably broken, Ross,” Helena told him seriously. “You know how machines are. They’re always doing something funny just when you least expect it.”
Ross bit down hard on his answer to that. Bernie contributed his morsel, and even Dr. Sam Jones, whose race had lost even the memory of spaceffight, had a suggestion. Ross swore at them all, then took time to swear at the board, at the starship, at Haarland, at Wesley, and most of all at himself.
Helena turned her back pointedly. She said to Bernie, “The way Ross acts sometimes you’d honestly think he was the only one who’d ever run this thing. Why, my goodness, I know you can’t rely on that silly board! Didn’t I have just exactly the same experience with it myself?”
Ross gritted his teeth and doggedly started all over again with the computations for Earth. Then he did a slow double-take.
“Helena,” he whispered. “What experience did you have?”
“Why, just the same as now! Don’t you remember, Ross? When you and Bernie were in jail and I had to come rescue you?”
“What happened?” Ross shouted.
“My goodness, Ross don’t yell at me! There was that silly light flashing all the time. It was driving me out of my mind. Well, I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t going to get anywhere if it was going to act like that, so I just——”
Ross, eyes glazed, robotlike, lifted the cover off the main Wesley unit. Down at the socket of the alarm signal, ‘shorting out two delicately machined helices that were a basic part of the Wesley drive, wedged between an eccentric vernier screw and a curious crystalline lattice, was—the hairpin.
He picked it out and stared at it unbelievingly. He marveled, “It says in the manual, ‘On no account should any alterations be made in any part of the Wesley driving assembly by any technician under a C-Twelve rating.’ She didn’t like the alarm going off. So she fixed it. With a hairpin.”
Helena giggled and appealed to Bernie. “Doesn’t he kill you?” she asked.
Ross’s eyes were glazed and his hands worked convulsively. “Kill,” he muttered, advancing on Helena. “Kill, kill, kill——”
“Help!” she screamed.
The two men managed to subdue Ross with the aid of a needle from Dr. Jones’s kit-pocket.
Helena was in tears and tried to explain to the others: “Just for no reason at all——”
She got only icy stares. After a while she sulkily began setting up the Wesley board for the Earth jump.
12
ROSS awoke, clearheaded and alert. Helena and Bernie were looking at him apprehensively.
He understood and said grudgingly, “Sorry I flipped. I didn’t mean to scare you. Everything seemed to go black——”
They smothered him with relieved protestations that they understood perfectly and Helena wouldn’t stick hairpins into the Wesley Drive ever again. Even if the ship hadn’t blown up. Even if she had rescued the men from “Minerva.”
“Anyway,” she said happily, “we’re off Earth. At least, it’s supposed to be Earth, according to the charts.”
He unkinked himself and studied the planet through a vision screen at its highest magnification. The apparent distance was one mile; nothing was hidden from him.
“Golly,” he said, impressed. “Science! Makes you realize what backward gropers we were.”
Obviously they had it, down there on the pleasant, cloud-flecked, green and blue planet. Science! White, towering cities whose spires were laced by flying bridges—and inexplicably decorated with something that looked like cooling fins. Huge superstreamlined vehicles lazily coursing the roads and skies. Long, linked-pontoon cities slowly heaving on the breasts of the oceans. Science!
Ross said reverently, “We’re here. Flarney was right. Helena, Bernie, Doc—maybe this is the parent planet of us all and maybe it isn’t. But the people who built those cities must know all the answers. Helena, will you please land us?”
“Sure, Ross. Shah11 look for a spaceport?”
Ross frowned. “Of course. Do you think these people are savages? We’ll go in openly and take our problem to them. Besides, imagine the radar setup they must have! We’d never sneak through even if we wanted to.”