"Oh yes." He grinned back at her. "We're both in a mell of a hess right now. It would be a fine thing if we couldn't trust one another. All you seem to want is a secure future and all I want is the same. That we seem to think that this secure future lies in opposite directions is the same factor that makes horse racing interesting. And, like horse racing, we'll find out soon enough who is right." "I hope it isn't the hard way." "Virginia, you are willing to take a job on this stuff. You're therefore willing to help the side you think cannot win?" "If anything is done to aid either side," she said, "and it comes out properly, isn't that a sign that the winning side has every right to succeed?" "Defining 'A' in terms of 'A'?" "No. I'm just willing to help get myself away from the certain doom of Earth One." "In other words," said Ed Bronson, "you'd work as hard for Leader Kingston as you would for me?" She looked at him squarely. "Ed," she said, "I wouldn't care to trust Leader Kingston." Then she turned from him, shrugged her shoulder out from beneath his hands and faced the upturned amplifier. Beneath the wreath of her hair he noted the blush that tinted the back of her neck. Bronson took a half step forward. His hands half reached for her shoulders again. Then he paused. "I'm going to check the mass spectrograph," he said and turned on his heel and left the room. This, he knew, was no time to question her motives. As he headed for the laboratory below, this thought crystallized. Questioning her motives would force quick judgment. He knew--and he wondered how he arrived at that sage opinion--that Virginia herself was not aware of the motives that made her keep him from a certain death and now caused her to help him. CHAPTER XIV _Explosive!_ Now it was silent in the computation laboratory, save for the occasional clicking of the super calculator that lined one wall of the room. Pages and pages of equations were piled high in the file box and Bronson sat in the control console of the big machine and worked. Hour after hour he alternated moments of quick activity over the keyboard with periods of quiet contemplation and reasoning as the answers to his mathematical problems came clicking back. Dimly he heard the door open behind him and he accepted it vaguely--disinterestedly--because the problem at hand was far more important. He felt her presence beside him and she was silent as she read his notes. He set up another problem on the keyboard and leaned back, looking up at her. "Found something?" she asked. "No," he replied. "Except that the space-resonant elements do not make sense in the mass spectrograph." "I know," she said. "We've known that for years." Bronson waved a book. "And I'm a little shocked at the lack of true basic research to be found on Earth Three." "What?" asked Virginia.