As soon as the Gray Lensman and his son left the vessel, Chief Technician Thorndyke--not the vice admiral of the same name--lined his crew up for inspection; men who, although many of them had as much rank and had had as many years of as much authority as their present boss, had been working for days to forget as completely as possible their executive positions and responsibilities. Each man wore not one, but three personal neutralizers, one inside and two outside of his spacesuit. Thorndyke, walking down the line, applied his test-kit to each individual neutralizer. He then tested his own. QX--all were at max. "Fellows," he said then, "you all remember what it was like last time. This is going to be the same, except more so and for a longer time. How we did it before without any casualties I'll never know. If we can do it again, it'll be a major miracle--no less. Before, all we had to do was to build a couple of small generators and some controls out of stuff native to the planet, and we didn't find that any too easy a job. This time, for a starter, we've got to build a Bergenholm big enough to free the whole planet; after which we install the Bergs, tube generators, atomic blasts, and other stuff we brought along. "But that native Berg is going to be a Class A Prime headache, and until we get it running it's going to be hell on wheels. The only way we can get away with it is to check and re-check every thing and every step. Check, check, double-check; then go back and double-check again. "Remember that the fundamental characteristics of this nth space are such that inert matter can travel faster than light; and remember, every second of the time, that our intrinsic velocity is something like fifteen lights relative to anything solid in this space. I want every one of you to picture himself going inert accidentally. You _might_ take a tangent course or higher--but you might not, too. And it wouldn't only kill the one who did it. It wouldn't only spoil our record. It could very easily kill us all and make a crater full of boiling metal out of our whole installation. So BE CAREFUL! Also bear in mind that one piece, however small, of this planet's material, accidentally brought aboard might wreck the _Dauntless_. Any questions?" "If the fundamental characteristics--constants--of this space are so different, how do you know that the stuff will work here?" "Well, the stuff we built here before worked. The Arisians told Kit Kinnison that two of the fundamentals, mass and length, are about normal. Time is a lot different, so that we can't compute power-to-mass ratios and so on, but we'll have enough power, anyway, to get any speed that we can use." "I see. We miss the really fancy stuff?" "Yes. Well, the quicker we get started the quicker we'll get done. Let's go." * * * * *