That night, the old adage died. The head that wore the crown of the Solar Combine slept like a kitten. And the only thing that bothered Co-ordinator Kennebec was that usual irrelevant wonder that crops up in the most trying of circumstances, though this was not trying, as circumstances go. Yet, Kennebec thought, it was like an hysteria almost; the unfunny joke that sends chief mourners off into gales of laughter. Incongruous and irrelevant, immaterial and inconsequential. But why in the name of Sol didn't they go into the living room, and do their necking on the love seat where it belonged instead of sitting on the cook's tall stool in the kitchen? XIII. The scene at the proving grounds was a bustle of activity. In the center of the area stood a huge machine with a paraboloid reflector, pointing skyward on gimbals. Supporting the projector was a girdered and trussed platform, with tractor beams on each corner, pointing down to the center of Terra. Vast was the machine; no telescope in the Solar Combine was half as solid as the trunnions and bars that rigidized the setting of the relatively small, ten-foot bowl of the projector. A line of portable telephone poles, strung with portable wiring, led from the housing below the projector. Off across the proving ground they went to a master-control office almost lost in the horizon and the haze. But the projector would not be studied from the remote position. That was just a clearing house--a veritable telephone exchange--that fed terrestrial data from all of the research laboratories of Terra to the monster on the proving ground. Inside the housing was Cliff Lane, directing the technical staff. There, too, was Linzete, the catman, brought back to Terra by Lane's doubly convincing mind. Linzete did not like primates; he avoided them and went out of his way to keep a two-foot clear space between himself and the primates as he moved around in the crowded housing. The Terrans, warned beforehand, did their best to honor his dislike of them. They respected his preference in contact, though they, at this point, tended to use his mind and his experience as something presented to them. For they--and he--knew that their mental ability exceeded his and he was there only because his experience had been greater than theirs. Out on the trestles and the catwalks of the machine stood Stellor Downing, directing the final touches of the monstrous mechanical system. The operator called to Lane: "The sounding-boat is over the Mindanao Deep, sir. Ready and waiting." "How's the terrestrial laboratory at Washington?" "Ready for an hour. And Cal Tech has been chewing their fingernails for two hours." "Call Downing and ask him how long?" "Calling Stellor Downing--" "On the roger," answered Downing, grabbing a phone from its rack on a catwalk. "How much more greasing are you going to give that mecanno set?" asked Cliff. "Oh, any time you're ready, we are." "I know but--"