Joe told his story. Concisely. The pilot gyros, which had to be perfect, had been especially gunned at by saboteurs. An attack with possibly stolen proximity-fused rockets. The plane was booby-trapped, and somebody at an airfield had had a chance to spring the trap. So it was wreckage. Crashed and burned on landing. The Chief growled. Haney pressed his lips together. The eyes of Mike were burning. "Plenty of that sabotage stuff," growled the Chief. "Hard to catch the so-and-sos. Smash the gyros and the take-off'd have to wait till new ones got made--and that's more time for more sabotage." Joe said carefully: "I think it can be licked. Listen a minute, will you?" The Chief fixed his eyes upon him. "The gyros have to be rebalanced," said Joe. "They have to spin on their own center of gravity. At the plant, they set them up, spun them, and found which side was heavy. They took metal off till it ran smoothly at five hundred r.p.m. Then they spun it at a thousand. It vibrated. They found imbalance that was too small to show up before. They fixed that. They speeded it up. And so on. They tried to make the center of gravity the center of the shaft by trimming off the weight that put the center of gravity somewhere else. Right?" The Chief said irritably: "No other way to do it! No other way!" "I saw one," said Joe. "When they cleaned up the wreck at the airfield, they heaved up the crates with a crane. The slings were twisted. Every crate spun as it rose. But not one wobbled! They found their own centers of gravity and spun around them!" The Chief scowled, deep in thought. Then his face went blank. "By the holy mud turtle!" he grunted. "I get it!" Joe said, with very great pains not to seem triumphant, "Instead of spinning the shaft and trimming the rotor, we'll spin the rotor and trim the shaft. We'll form the shaft around the center of gravity, instead of trying to move the center of gravity to the middle of the shaft. We'll spin the rotors on a flexible bearing base. I think it'll work." Surprisingly, it was Mike the midget who said warmly, "You got it! Yes, sir, you got it!" The Chief took a deep breath. "Yeah! And d'you know how I know? The Plant built a high-speed centrifuge once. Remember?" He grinned with the triumph Joe concealed. "It was just a plate with a shaft in the middle. There were vanes on the plate. It fitted in a shaft hole that was much too big. They blew compressed air up the shaft hole. It floated the plate up, the air hit the vanes and spun the plate--and it ran as sweet as honey! Balanced itself and didn't wobble a bit! We'll do something like that! Sure!" "Will you work on it with me?" asked Joe. "We'll need a sort of crew--three or four altogether. Have to figure out the stuff we need. I can ask for anybody I want. I'm asking for you. You pick the others." The Chief grinned broadly. "Any objections, Haney? You and Mike and me and Joe here? Look!"