"If we could get into that neutral area long enough to turn on our space strain drive, we could get away between them fast. Of course, a lot of our energy would be eaten up, but we'd get away. "That's our only hope," Arcot concluded. "Yes, and what a whale of a hope it is," Wade snorted sarcastically. "How are you going to get out to a point halfway between these two stars when you don't have enough power to lift this ship a few miles?" "If Mahomet can not go to the mountain," misquoted Arcot, "then the mountain must come to Mahomet." "What are you going to do?" Wade asked in exasperation. "Beat Joshua? He made the sun stand still, but this is a job of throwing them around!" "It is," agreed Arcot quietly, "and I intend to throw that star in such a way that we can escape between the twin fields! We can escape between the hammer and the anvil as millions of millions of millions of tons of matter crash into each other." "And you intend to swing that?" asked Wade in awe as he thought of the spectacle there would be when two suns fell into each other. "Well, I don't want to be around." "You haven't any choice," Arcot grinned. Then his face grew serious. "What I want to do is simple. We have the molecular ray. Those stars are hot. They don't fall into each other because they are rotating about each other. Suppose that rotation were stopped--stopped suddenly and completely? The molecular ray acts catalytically; we won't supply the power to stop that star, the star itself will. All we have to do is cause the molecules to move in a direction opposite to the rotation. We'll supply the impulse, and the star will supply the energy! "Our job will be to break away when the stars get close enough; we are really going to hitch our wagon to a star! "The mechanics of the job are simple. We will have to calculate when and how long to use the power, and when and how quickly to escape. We'll have to use the main power board to generate the ray and project it instead of the little ray units. With luck, we ought to be free of this star in three days!" Work was started at once. They had a chance of life in sight, and they had every intention of taking advantage of it! The calculating machines they had brought would certainly prove worth their mass in this one use. The observations were extremely difficult because the ship was rocketing around the star in such a rapid orbit. The calculations of the mass and distance and orbital motion of the other star were therefore very difficult, but the final results looked good. The other star and this one formed a binary, the two being of only slightly different mass and rotating about each other at a distance of roughly two million miles. The next problem was to calculate the time of fall from that point, assuming that it would stop instantaneously, which would be approximately true.