"Right," he said unsteadily. "Anyway, Starre, as I was saying, this ship operates according to the reverse Fitzgerald Contraction Formula. All moving bodies contract in the line of motion. What Holloway and Hammond did was to reverse that universal law. They caused the contraction first--motion had to follow! The gravitonic field affects every atom in the ship with the same speed at the same time. We could go from zero speed to our top speed of two thousand miles a second just like that!" He snapped his fingers. "No acceleration effects. This type of ship, necessary in our business, can stop flat, back up, ease up, move in any direction, and the passengers wouldn't have any feeling of motion at--Oh, hell!" Bob groaned, the serious glory of her eyes making him shake. He took her hand. "Starre," he said desperately, "I've got to tell you something--" She jerked her hand away. "No," she exclaimed in an almost frightened voice. "You can't tell me. There's--there's Mac," she finished, faltering. "The asteroid--" "You _have_ to marry him?" Her eyes filled with tears. "I have to live up to the bargain." "And ruin your whole life," he ground out. Suddenly, he turned back to the control board, quartered the vision plate. He pointed savagely to the lower left quarter, which gave a rearward view of the dumbbell ship trailing astern. "There's your ship, Starre." He jabbed his finger at it. "I've got a feeling--and I can't put the thought into concrete words--that somehow the whole solution of the problem of grabbing the asteroid back lies there. But how? _How?_" Starre's blue eyes followed the long cable back to where it was attached around her ship's narrow midsection. She shook her head helplessly. "It just looks like a big yo-yo to me." "A yo-yo?" "Yes, a yo-yo. That's all." She was belligerent. "A _yo-yo_!" Bob Parker yelled the word and almost hit the ceiling, he got out of the chair so fast. "Can you imagine it! A yo-yo!" He disappeared from the room. "Queazy!" he shouted. "_Queazy, I've got it!_" * * * * * It was Queazy who got into his space-suit and did the welding job, fastening two huge supra-steel "eyes" onto the dumbbell-shaped ship's narrow midsection. Into these eyes cables which trailed back to two winches in the big ship's nose were inserted, welded fast, and reinforced. The nose of the hauler was blunt, perfectly fitted for the job. Bob Parker practiced and experimented for three hours with this yo-yo of cosmic dimensions, while Starre and Queazy stood over him bursting into strange, delighted squeals of laughter whenever the yo-yo reached the end of its double cable and started rolling back up to the ship. Queazy snapped his fingers. "It'll work!" His gray eyes showed satisfaction. "Now, if only the Saylor brothers are where we calculated!"