As soon as the _Albion_ was safely out of range of the League ships, the two officers were joined on the bridge by Master Gunner Cliff Irvington. They discussed the narrow squeak for a few minutes. At length Irvington punched out his cigar and confessed, "I could stand a drink." Ten minutes later they were seated in Harrigan's Spartan quarters over a bottle of good Terran Irish whiskey and a flagon of Jovian Blongah. Irvington downed an heroic shot of the Jovian mixture, shivered, howled and grabbed for the pitcher of water which the orderly had placed on the small table. "Of all the chicken drinkers," O'Brien chaffed. "One little swig and he's halfway under the table. Watch this, son, and learn from a master of the aht." Whereupon the Captain poured a water glass full of the volatile brew and swallowed it without batting an eye. "Nuts," Cliff grunted. "I have to stay off the stuff for months at a time. You birds on the bridge can swill from one side of the galaxy to the other, but I've got to watch my nerves. And how about that night in Venusport when I had you two guys reeling, the night before we got our commissions?" Harrigan stifled a belch. "Only an idiot could drink that ook and stay on his pins. What was it now? Oh yes, Thunderbolt cocktail. Two parts Terran vodka, one part Irish whiskey, gin, three raw eggs, nutmeg and a jolt of Martian faylee. Cosmos! They say it made good rocket fuel in a pinch." O'Brien sat up, glass in hand. "Why don't we mix a batch right now?" "Don't see why not." Harrigan flipped the audio switch. "Stores. Hanson? Send a man up with formula thirteen, will you?" When the supplies arrived a few minutes later, the three men indulged in an orgy of mixing and much testing, and, when the contents of the huge bowl met their rigid specifications, sat around it and reminisced about the early days in the Force. The three might easily have personified the Solar Federation Space Force. Harrigan, the organizer par excellence, tall, lean and tanned by the radiation of a thousand suns. O'Brien, the admiral's life-long friend, squat and muscular--the fatherly but deadly Irishman who had hated the League with all his powerful heart since the day, dim in time but not in memory, that the Xantus had murdered his parents on Sirius III in the First Campaign. And Irvington, one of the truly fabulous characters in the Federation. The man who could reputedly hit a black basketball at three million miles with an energy gun, who flunked out of pilot's school and turned gunner, and who, annually, spent his leave mining in the Solar asteroid belt and had become the richest man in the Force. These men led the _Albion_ on its questionable course into the future. Human, and therefore prone to human failings, to be sure. But wise in the ways of space they were too, and aware of its terrible dangers.