"Shucks," said Sandra disparagingly, "there's nothing to it at all." "Well, could be, but we'll run this show our way. There is no objection to your leaving?" "No. Definitely not. They'd be sorry to see me go, but it is personal affection and the possibility for their ultimate gain that makes it so. They wouldn't dare detain me even though they might consider it. To my knowledge, they haven't even considered it." "Why wouldn't they dare?" asked McBride. "Afraid. After all, they know that both of us came from a star nine light-years away. They haven't even got the primary drive, let alone the third-derivative drive. Any untoward move to a Solarian would bring the devil himself down about their ears and they know it." "I suppose so. We could drop plenty of stuff on 'em with a half dozen space cans. And a couple of monolobar mechano-gravitics would scramble up the works of any fleet of stratosphere planes they could send against us. Never gave the gravitic armament much thought, but it could be done. O.K., Sandra, as soon as we sniff the air and check our gas and water, we'll be in." "I'm going back to bed, then," said Sandra. "Slip me another call before you land and I'll have the village band out to meet you. That's a promise." * * * * * Steve Hammond turned to McBride after Sandra had clicked her transmitter off, and said: "No use checking for seetee matter, is there? Seems to me that Drake would have found it out the hard way." "No, we can skip the seetee. But Drake may not worry about radioactivity but we will. We'll check for it; I'd like for John Jr. to have a brother or sister some day--with the proper amount of arms, legs, fingers, toes, ears, eyes, noses--" "What's the proper amount of noses for a son?" asked Hammond. "One," grinned McBride. "A kid with two noses could smell a lot," observed Timkins. "_Phew!_" said McBride holding his nose. "That was fierce. Man the counter and check the region for hot stuff, Larry. Looks like the landing of LaDrake saves us a lot of work. The physical properties of ... Telfu ... seem to be all right. So we'll go to work on the electrical properties, the nuclear properties, and also see if there's anything running around loose in the gravitics other than the inherent mechanogravitic property of matter." Larry Timkins set up a series of plungers on the control board and locked the pre-set operations into the autopilot. "This," he said, "will hang us on a logarithmic spiral approaching Telfu. While we're roaming around the planet, we'll check the hot-properties of the neighborhood. Any comment?" "Nope. Give 'em the works." Timkins drove the coupler button home and the _Haywire Queen_ swung gently to follow the pre-determined course. "You know, Steve, there's a cod-liver-oil smell about this, somewhere." "So? What's fishy?" "The old tub isn't behaving like a lady." "What do you mean?"