"Might bore a large hole in it and pack in a mile of Atomite," suggested McBride. "I'd hate to support that, though." "Better get some seetee meteors and pelt it by remote control," said Hammond. "Well, we can cover that later." To Tet'h he said: "You come in?" Tet'h and Thani held a quick conference. "She come, too?" he asked. "All of you." "No. They stay. We go Terra." "Terra!" exploded Hammond. "Much to learn--both of us. You and I. You learn Telfan. We learn Terran. Better talk. This ... lousy." "Easy to see Sandra's delicate hand in this language lesson," grinned Timkins. "Better call that wild woman. Tell her we're going to take off in one hour and ten minutes because if we don't, we'll be as stuck as she is and we don't like that. As long as we have a bit of Telfu to take back with us in the shape of Tet'h and his woman Thani, we needn't stick around. I'll feel better about getting off on this rotation anyway. G'wan, we'll listen to you make the excuses, Larry." "My turn to poke her on the pretty little schnozzola?" "You won that by that three times something to the minus umpty-umpth power percentage of landing error. Twelve feet in what?" "2,630,000,000,000,000,000 feet." "Was that the same he said before?" asked McBride with a smile. "Or was he working that old gag about our not remembering?" "I don't remember either." "So, you win," said McBride to Larry Timkins. * * * * * Timkins called, and Sandra Drake's slightly hysterical voice replied. "How you doing?" asked Larry. "Where are you?" "I don't know." "Don't know?" said Sandra. Her voice went up in a crescendo and hit "G" above High "C" on the last note. "No," said Larry. "Chicago, Venuland, Canalport, and Sharon are my best landmarks and they're all equally distant and in the same direction from here." "Go to hell." "That's across the River Styx from Sharon, on Pluto," said Timkins. "And that expression is making the Sharonites unhappy because people have been going there for thousands of years. Sharon hasn't the popularity." "But look, Larry, I want to go along." "Can you get here in one hour and eleven minutes. That's the absolute deadline until we can get to Terra and cook up a drive that's detuned enough from the cupralum-absorption region to permit us to tinker off and on around here." "Where are you? How can I get there if you don't know where you are?" "Ask someone." Sandra's language became something that the communications commission has legislated against. "Can you come here and get me?" "We'll be doing fine if we get off with our skin," said Larry. "We definitely have not enough power to go roaming all over Telfu. We're on the one spot that will allow us to leave under the emergencies. An hour and thirty minutes from now that spot will be somewhere else. We'll wait an hour and ten and take off on the edge of the spot." "Won't they come back and get me?"