"Meanwhile," Hull said, the acid bite of fear in his voice, "we have to sit here and wait for the Interplanetary Police to find us by pure luck." The captain should have let Hull cling to the idea that the IP could find the _Persephone_, even if no signal was sent. But the captain was almost as angry and flustered as Hull was. [Illustration] "Find us?" he snapped. "Don't be ridiculous! We won't even be missed until we're due at Styx, on Pluto, nine days from now. By that time, we'll be close to two billion miles beyond the orbit of Pluto. We'll never be found if we wait 'til then. Something has to be done _now_!" He looked at his Maintenance Officer. "Smith, isn't there some way to make contact between those two plugs?" "Sure," Smith said bitterly. "If we had the tools, it would be duck soup. All we'd have to do is trim down the male plug to fit the female, and we'd have it. But we don't have the tools. We've got a couple of files and a quarter-horsepower electric drill with one bit. Everything else was in the tool compartment--which is long gone, with the engine room." "Can't you ... uh, what do you call it? Uh ... jury-something--" Hull's voice sounded as though he were forcing it to be calm. "Jury-rig?" Smith said. "Yeah? With what? Dammit, we haven't got any tools, and we haven't got any materials to work with!" "Can't you just use a wrench to tighten them more?" Hull asked helplessly. Smith said a dirty word and pushed himself away from the screamer unit to glower at an unresisting wall. "No, Mr. Hull, we couldn't," said Captain Al-Amin with restrained patience. "That would strip the threads. If the electrical contact were made at the same time, the high-pressure oxygen-hydrogen flow would spark off, and we'd get a big explosion that would wreck everything--including us." Then he muttered to himself: "I still don't see how it could happen." Jayjay Kelvin pulled a nine of spades from the back of the deck to the front. It matched the four of spades that had come three cards before. Jayjay discarded the two cards between the spades. "You don't?" he asked. "Didn't you ever hear that the total is greater than the sum of its parts?" "What?" Captain Al-Amin sounded as though he'd been insulted--in Arabic. "What are you talking about, Mr. Kelvin?" "I'm talking about the idiocy of the checking system," Jayjay said flatly. "Don't you see what they did? Don't you see what happened? Each part of a screamer has to be checked separately, right?" Al-Amin nodded. "Why? Because the things burn out if you check them as a complete unit. It's like checking a .50 caliber cartridge. The only way you can check a cartridge is to shoot it in a gun. If it works, then you know it works. Period. The only trouble is that you've wasted the cartridge. You know that _that_ one is good, but you've ruined it.