"Not much better. Oh well, a lack of free E-grav energy surely isn't anything to write home about. Might be a factor of the Sirian Double. After all, who knows what kind of effect that little, dark-red, dense-as-hell devil will do to gravitic threshold levels." "So it's a safe bet--" Timkins came running in, waving a sheet of cross-ruled paper. "Hell's bells," he yelled. "We're it! Our drive is approaching zero efficiency as the third power of--" * * * * * Above, in the working innards of the _Haywire Queen_, great circuit breakers crashed open. Smaller switches added to the din as they clicked open, one after the other. Pilot lights on the polished black panel began to glow an angry red and alarm bells created such a din that speech became almost impossible. The drive went off. And the men and their portable equipment left the solid floor and began to float aimlessly across the room in midair. Hammond clutched wildly at a spectrograph, and caught it. "Catch!" he yelled at McBride, hurling the heavy instrument at John. McBride folded himself over the instrument with a grunt of escaping breath. The act did two things. It sent Hammond across the room to the emergency panel in one direction and McBride went in the opposite direction to the navigator's calculating machine. McBride caught the navigator's table at the same time that Hammond caught the emergency panel. Steve fought with the emergency panel and succeeded in setting up about eleven feet per second deceleration. McBride lowered the spectrograph to the table and seated himself in the chair. "Woah, Nellie," grunted McBride as the alarm bells ceased. "Where do we go from here and how fast?" "I dunno, but we're leaving both Sirius and Sol at a terrific velocity and a deceleration of eleven feet per. From a mental calculation of the fundamental drive at this velocity, I'd say it would take about fourteen years to get down to a stop." "What happened to the emergency relays?" "They worked," said Steve dryly. "Yeah, they worked. But the inefficiency extends to the fundamental drive, too, it seems. I'm beginning to think that this is not inherent." "That's a quick decision." "Sure. But the prime drive is O.K. The meters say so. It's just inefficient as the devil which is not true of a good drive. Holy smoke! We're getting efficient again!" Timkins picked himself off of the floor painfully. "Uh-huh," he grunted. "Also, we're leaving Telfu behind at a fierce rate. Can you keep that eleven feet prime acceleration for a bit?" "We're going to." "I'm going to dash madly upstairs and hang the sigma recorder on again. Something is slippery here." "What's our velocity at the present time?" asked McBride. "Up in the fifteen thousand miles per second," answered Hammond. "Hm-m-m. Then at what point with respect to Telfu did the drive go out?" "About a million and a half miles, roughly."