But the week went by, and I didn't think of anything. I'd be working over the control board, and then I'd look up, and she'd be smiling at me. I'd raise an eyebrow, and she'd stick her tongue out. We shared cigarettes. I'd take a drag, hand her the butt, and she'd cuff me when I blew smoke in her face. "Hey, Goon," she'd say from behind the plotting board, "d'ja hear the one about the lady sociologist who wandered into Bessie's place on Venus?" I taught her original verses to _The Song of the Wandering Spacemen_. Then she taught me the verses she knew. We crossed Mars' orbit. I couldn't think of any way to find out what I'd been killing myself over except to ask. "Ever hear of the D.O.'s?" I asked quietly. "Will chewing chlorophyl tablets cure 'em?" she asked. I laughed so hard that I cried. "I don't think so," I answered automatically, and got busy checking the breech assembly on one of the ship's rocket launchers. "Lay off that, apeface," Pat said. "We won't need it." "How come?" "If anybody comes around looking unfriendly, just give 'em this on the radio," she said, and whistled off a recognition signal in Martian. I turned slowly away from the launcher. Thorsten did have a deal with the Marties. What was more, Pat was in on it. She had to be. She looked at my face. "What's the matter, Lump? Something you ate?" "Sit down, Pat," I said, pointing to the navigation table. "Go on, sit down!" I yelled. She turned white. "You know what kind of a ship this is, don't you?" I said, feeling like I was a hundred years old. "Sure." She nodded. She was beginning to get it. "You weren't supposed to know about that." "I didn't. Not until we were spaceborne." Didn't she realize? Couldn't she see what she was doing to me? "Pat, do you know what'll happen if the Marties get this drive? They'll be able to hit Earth and Venus with everything they've got, coming out of nowhere and going back into hyperspace when they're through. The TSN won't stand a chance against them." She shrugged. "They probably would, if they ever got it, but they won't. Harry's going to assemble the drive, install it in his ships, and then we'll take off. The Marties'll be stuck." "Wait a minute--you just mentioned taking off. Where to?" She looked up at me. "Harry says there's another planet out in hyperspace, somewhere, circling another star. He says people can live on it." Her eyes were shining, and I remembered a girl on a terrace, back at the Academy, with a dream in her voice that I'd been too dumb to recognize. "He does, does he? Can he prove it? How do you know what he's really going to do?" "Because he's told me!" she flared. "He's going to by-pass the fumbling bureaucrats who run things on Earth and take mankind out to the stars--mankind, Ash, the toughest, the strongest men in space, and their women. Space belongs to us, Ash, not to those Earthbound lilies!"