And then McBride was in the _Haywire Queen_ and the air lock was cracked. The big ship lifted gently and zipped out of the lock with a casual disregard for distances. Unlike Drake's precision take-off, the _Haywire Queen_ went through the open door with the air of wanting to leave quickly because there were better things to do than worry about hitting the center plus or minus an inch. Enid pointed out the Dog Star to John McBride, Junior. "That's where your daddy is going," she told him. Junior McBride was more interested in the teething bone that he had clamped between toothless gums, than he was in the stellar regions. He knew his daddy would be back. * * * * * The _Haywire Queen_ approached and passed the speed of light from the hard side, and her terrific velocity dropped down to a figure that was expressible in miles per second without running out of zeroes. Below, and thirty degrees from the axis of the ship, Sirius and the Dark Companion beckoned from less than a thousand million miles. The lower dome of the ship sported the faces of the men, who were laying on their stomachs, looking down at the splendor of the first binary ever seen by man. Hammond mentioned it, as a matter of fact. "How about Drake?" asked McBride. "We're still the first _men_," returned Hammond. "Wouldn't Drake howl to hear you say that," laughed McBride. "She's been suffering under the fact that every time she did anything new, she had to qualify it by saying: 'The first woman--' Well, she's got something this time." "Think it'll satisfy her?" "Not until someone proves definitely that Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, William Shakespeare, George Washington, Richard the First, Julius Caesar, and Jack Frost were all women." "Well, let's get the hemis working. We'll never know whether Sirius has planets until we do. I'd hate to sit in the _Queen_ and go through all the growing pains of looking for planets by observation." "Yeah, that would take years. What's our velocity, Larry?" Timkins looked at the velocimeter; squinted through the instrument quickly, adjusting the thumb-screw; and then said: "Thirty-four thousand and dropping at one hundred feet per second, per second, per second." "We can get good pix of anything close enough to the primary to support life--also big enough, too--in about thirty minutes exposure," said Hammond. "We'll take two shots in each direction, since I've got six hemispherical cameras. That'll give us complete overlapping coverage and double protection against dust streaks. Let's go. Also cut the drive by half."