"Too bad that this gyration is not enough to make a decent gravity at the ends, at least," snorted Hadley. He hooked Jimmy by an arm and hauled the man back to a place beside him. "Now look," he said, "I can't possibly guess how many people are still in working condition after this. Aside from our taped and doped friend here, the only ones I have are we who were snoozing in our beds when the crush came. I'll bet a cooky that the rest of the crowd are all nursing busted ribs, and worse. Lucky that full-G died slowly as the cathodes went out; otherwise we'd all have been tossed against the ceilings with bad effects. "Jimmy, you're a committee of one to roam the crate and make a list of everyone who is still in the running and those who can be given minor repairs to make them fit for limited work. Doc has a pretty good supply of Stader splints; inform him that these are only to be used on men who can be useful with them. The rest will have to take to plaster casts and the old-fashioned kind of fracture-support. "Pete, you get to the executive deck and tell Captain Johannson that we're on the job and about to make with repairs. As power engineer, I've control of the maintenance gang too, and we'll collect the whole, hale, and hearty of Michaels' crew on our merry way. "Tom, take three of your men and begin to unravel the mess with an eye toward getting us lights. "Tony, you can do this alone since we have no weight. You get the stale cathodes from the supply hold and hang 'em back in the tubes. "Channing, until we get a stable place, you couldn't do a thing about trying to get help, so I suggest that you pitch in with Bennington, there, and help unscramble the wiring. You're a circuit man, and though power-line stuff is not your forte, you'll find that running a lighting circuit is a lot easier than neutralizing a microwave transmitter. Once we get light, you can help us haywire a control panel. Right?" "Right. And as far as contacting the folks back home goes, we couldn't do a darned thing until the time comes when we should be dropping in on Mojave. They won't be looking for anything from us until we're reported missing; then I imagine that Walt Franks will have everything from a spinthariscope to a gold-foil electroscope set up. Right now I'm stumped, but we have seventeen hours before we can start hoping to be detected. Tom, where do we begin?" Bennington smiled inwardly. To have Don Channing asking him for orders was like having Captain Johannson request the batteryman's permission to change course. "If you can find and remove the place where the shorted line is, and then splice the lighting circuits again, we'll have a big hunk of our work done. The rest of us will begin to take lines off of the pilot's circuits right here in the instrument room so that our jury-controls can be hooked in. You'll need a suit, I think, because I'll bet a hat that the shorted line is in the well." * * * * *