"I hope so, but I think you're being charitable again. Like most of the girls here, I suppose, I have never been out in deep space at all. Besides a few hops to the Moon, I have taken only two flits, and they were both only interplanetary. One to Mars and one to Venus. I never could see how you deep-space men can really understand what you're doing--either the frightful speeds at which you travel, the distance you cover, or the way your communicators work. In fact, a professor told us that no human mind can understand figures of those magnitudes at all. But you must understand them, I should think ... oh, perhaps--" "Or maybe the guy isn't human?" Kinnison laughed deeply, infectiously. "No, your professor was right. We can't understand the figures, but we don't have to--all we have to do is to work with them. And, now that it has just percolated through my skull who you really are, that you are _Gladys_ Forrester, it is quite clear that you are in that same boat." "Me? How?" she exclaimed. "The human mind cannot really understand a million of anything. Yet your father, an immensely wealthy man, gave you clear title to a million credits in cash, to train you in finance in the only way that really produces results--the hard way of actual experience. You lost a lot of it at first, of course; but at last accounts you had got it all back, and some besides, in spite of all the smart guys trying to take it away from you. The fact that your brain cannot envisage a million credits has not interfered with your manipulation of that amount, has it?" "No, but that's entirely different!" she protested. "Not in any essential feature," he countered. "I can explain it best, perhaps, by analogy. You can't visualize, mentally, the size of North America, either, yet that fact does not bother you in the least while you are driving around on it in an automobile. What do you drive? On the ground, I mean, not in the air?" "A De Khotinsky sporter." "Um. Top speed a hundred and forty miles per hour, and I suppose you cruise between ninety and a hundred. We'll have to pretend that you drive a Crownover sedan, or some other big, slow jalopy, so that you will tour at about sixty and have an absolute top of ninety. Also, you have a radio. On the broadcast bands you can hear a program from three or four thousand miles away; or, on short wave, from anywhere on Tellus--" "I can get tight-beam short-wave programs from the Moon," the girl broke in. "I've heard them lots of times." "Yes," Kinnison assented dryly, "at such times as there didn't happen to be any interference." "Static _is_ pretty bad, lots of times," the heiress agreed. * * * * *