And then there came a bit of understanding. It hit hard. And in the brief minutes that Sandra looked facts in the face before she took to demanding impossible things once more, she realized that she had backed into her own trap. She had been demanding. She had chosen to teach those who met her the Terran language instead of learning Telfan. Now those who understood any bit of Terran had gone to meet the _Haywire Queen_, leaving her among those who could not understand her at all. She could not communicate her desires to any of them. She could not even tell them of the desire that they wanted to hear: That she wanted to leave. The whole city would have broken a blood vessel to get her out. But they didn't talk the same language. The _Haywire Queen_ came down in a screaming, wild landing. She rifled down out of the sky, careening. She slanted for a half mile, and then squared away and came plummeting down vertically. Inside, the accelerometer was making wild gyrations as Timkins fought the controls. The whistling of the big ship's passage through the air slid down the audible scale as the velocity dropped. The ship slowed, and came to a perfect landing-- Twelve feet above the surface! Like a slug of lead, the _Haywire Queen_ poised for the barest instant, and then dropped the intervening distance. The landing plates sank into the soft soil of Telfu for several feet and the plates groaned, a rivet or two squeaked, and some welded joints disagreed. But spaceships are rigid structures, made for hard usage and considerable stresses and strains. It weathered the hard landing, though the angle was slightly cocked due to the unevenness of the turf's hardness. The _Haywire Queen_ was still space-worthy. "Rotten pilot," muttered Hammond. "Terrible," agreed McBride. "Look, you two grinning apes. I missed Telfu by exactly one hundred and forty-four inches. Twelve feet in 2,630,000,000,000,000,000 feet. Well within the experimental error, I think." "Twelve feet in nine light-years isn't bad," said McBride. "Some day, Larry, you can bend that mathematical mechanism you use instead of a brain into calculating whether the landing effect would have been worse at _plus_ twelve feet instead of minus." "A mere matter of kinetic energy dissipated--" "Yeah, we know. Well, you didn't kill us," laughed Hammond. "So let's go out and take a look at the wonders of the Telfan scenery." "Take a quick look," said McBride. "Here come some Telfans to take a look at some Terran science." "Wonder how they got here so quick," asked Timkins of no one in particular. "Ask 'em." Timkins stepped out of the space lock and smiled at the Telfans. "Ave, Canis Majoris," he said in a deep voice. "Lousy Latin," snorted McBride. "That's where they live." "Do they know that?" The foremost Telfan, who was Tet'h, stepped forward and smiled. "You ... Terrans?" "Yes." He pointed to the ship. "_'Aywire Queen?_" "Yes." Tet'h smiled once more and offered his hand.