Dr. Morton came to the _Esperance_ before her departure. He had a problem. He'd predicted to the minute, and almost to the mile, the landing of the bolide of the night before. That was the first accurate prediction of the kind in history. But his forecast stood alone in its precision. Nobody else had even come near being right. Now he was being insistently queried by astronomers the world over. They wanted to know how he'd done it. In particular, they wanted to know how he'd figured that the bolide would lose just so many feet per second velocity, neither more nor less, in a three-quarter orbit around the world. Nobody else had such a figure in his equation for the landing spot. Dr. Morton had. His prediction had been exact. Where did he get that necessary but inexplicable figure? He beckoned Davis and Terry to go below with him, in the _Esperance's_ after cabin. Terry hesitated. "You may as well hear my troubles," said Morton vexedly. "You're largely responsible for them." Terry followed uneasily. He didn't see how Dr. Morton could hold them responsible. He had guarded his own guesses about the _Esperance's_ discoveries against even the slightest expression. He couldn't let himself believe in their correctness, but he was appalled at the inadequacy of all other explanations of past events. "In sixteen months," said Morton annoyedly, down below, "we've spotted six bolides coming in to land in the Luzon Deep. That's out of all reason! Of course, it could be a mathematical series of wildly unlikely coincidences, such as probability says may happen sometimes. Up to last night that seemed to be a possible explanation." Davis nodded. His expression was odd. "But now," said Morton somehow indignantly, "that's ruled out! It's ruled out by last night's bolide, and yesterday's fishing experiment, and that business of the shining sea, plus those damned plastic gadgets and deep sea fish thriving in shallow water! There's no reasonable explanation for such things, and they're not mere coincidences!" "I'm afraid," admitted Davis, "that they're not." "The obvious explanation," said Morton doggedly, "I refuse to name or consider. But nevertheless the question is not whether a theory or an explanation is unlikely or not. The question is whether it's true!" Davis nodded. Terry had to agree. But the way people are trained in modern times puts a great emphasis on reason, often at the expense of fact. Terry felt the customary civilized reluctance to accept a statistically improbable idea. "I'm on a spot," fumed Morton. "I calculated that the damned bolide would slow after it went into orbit around the earth. I calculated that it would slow exactly so much. Do you want to know how I figured how much it should slow down? I'll tell you! I calculated exactly how much it would have to slow to be able to fall into the Luzon Deep! It did slow. It did fall there. But how am I going to explain that to Washington?"