They hung half a million miles off Jones, and Ross fumbled irritatedly with the Wesley panel while the other three stood around and made helpful suggestions. He set up the integrals for Earth just as he had set them up once before; the plot came out the same. He transferred the computations to the controls and checked it against the record in the log. The same. The ship should have gone straight as a five-dimensional geodesic arrow to the planet Earth. Instead, he found by cross-checking the star atlas, it had gone in almost the other direction entirely, to the planet of Jones. He threw his pencil across the room and swore. “I don’t get it,” he complained. “It’s probably broken, Ross,” Helena told him seriously. “You know how machines are. They’re _always_ doing something funny just when you least expect it.” Ross bit down hard on his answer to that. Bernie contributed his morsel, and even Dr. Sam Jones, whose race had lost even the memory of spaceflight, had a suggestion. Ross swore at them all, then took time to swear at the board, at the starship, at Haarland, at Wesley, and most of all at himself. Helena turned her back pointedly. She said to Bernie, “The way Ross acts sometimes you’d honestly think he was the _only_ one who’d _ever_ run this thing. Why, my goodness, I _know_ you can’t _rely_ on that silly board! Didn’t I have just exactly the same experience with it myself?” Ross gritted his teeth and doggedly started all over again with the computations for Earth. Then he did a slow double-take. “Helena,” he whispered. “What experience did you have?” “Why, just the same as now! Don’t you _remember_, Ross? When you and Bernie were in jail and I had to come rescue you?” “What happened?” Ross shouted. “My goodness, Ross don’t _yell_ at me! There was that silly light flashing all the time. It was driving me out of my _mind_. Well, I knew _perfectly_ well that I wasn’t going to get anywhere if it was going to act like _that_, so I just——” Ross, eyes glazed, robotlike, lifted the cover off the main Wesley unit. Down at the socket of the alarm signal, shorting out two delicately machined helices that were a basic part of the Wesley drive, wedged between an eccentric vernier screw and a curious crystalline lattice, was—the hairpin. He picked it out and stared at it unbelievingly. He marveled, “It says in the manual, ‘On no account should any alterations be made in any part of the Wesley driving assembly by any technician under a C-Twelve rating.’ She didn’t like the alarm going off. So she fixed it. With a hairpin.” Helena giggled and appealed to Bernie. “Doesn’t he _kill_ you?” she asked. Ross’s eyes were glazed and his hands worked convulsively. “Kill,” he muttered, advancing on Helena. “Kill, kill, kill——” “Help!” she screamed. The two men managed to subdue Ross with the aid of a needle from Dr. Jones’s kit-pocket. Helena was in tears and tried to explain to the others: “Just for no reason at _all_——”