Bob whirled toward Queazy, tensely, thrust the check into his hands. He jerked it back, hastily endorsed it and thrust it at Queazy again. "Cash it! Quick! I'll meet you in the Somers Hotel." Queazy asked no questions, but lifted the ship, and left. At twenty minutes of twelve, somebody having rushed Starre into a hurried preparation for the wedding, the minister climbed a ladder to the apex of the asteroid, and the wedding march sounded out. Bob saw Starre, walking slowly on her grandfather's arm, her eyes looking straight ahead. "Now!" Bob prayed. "_Now!_" He groaned inwardly. It wasn't going to happen! He'd been a fool to think-- Then a yell, completely uninhibited, escaped his lips. The asteroid was quivering, precisely like gelatine dessert. Pieces of iron ore, tungsten, quartz and cinnabar began to fall from its sides. Little rivulets of a silvery-white liquid gushed outward in streams. The wedding guests leapt to their feet with startled cries, starting running back toward higher ground. The wedding march ended in a clatter of discords. And Bob reached the asteroid as it went to pieces completely. He found himself ankle-deep in rivulets of liquid metal. He was swept off his feet, came up hanging onto a jagged boulder of floating iron ore. He looked around on a mad scene. Screams, yells, tangled legs. "_Bob!_" Starre's voice. Bob plunged toward her, yelling above the general tumult. For a radius of several hundred feet, there was a sluggishly moving liquid. People were floating on it, or standing in it ankle-deep, dumbfounded. Bob reached Starre, swept her up in his arms, went slushing off to the edge of the pool. Starre was laughing uncontrollably. "There's a helicopter on the other side of the house," she cried. "We can get away before they get organized." * * * * * They found Queazy in a room at the Somers Hotel. He opened the door, and the worry on his face dissipated as he saw them. Behind him on a table were stacks of five-thousand-dollar bills. Before he could say anything, Starre demanded of him, "I couldn't get married on an asteroid if the asteroid wasn't there any more, could I, Queazy? One minute the asteroid was there and the next minute I was wading in a metal lake." "Quicksilver," Bob Parker agreed happily. "The asteroid was almost entirely frozen mercury, except for an outer solid layer of iron ore, tungsten, quartz, cinnabar." "I just took exterior readings," Starre explained, sheepishly. "So I figured," continued Bob, "that if I took a lot of spectroscopic readings of the interior I could determine exactly how big a mass of frozen quicksilver there was. And how long it would take to thaw out once it was inside Earth's atmosphere! "That's the reason I had things scheduled to the dot, Queazy. I coaxed the asteroid along until the mercury was almost thawed out. When the wedding started, it melted all at once, being the same temperature all the way through. Satisfied?"