"I'm afraid that I'm not going to, very well," replied Stevens, with a wry grimace. "What I don't know about metallurgy would fill a library, and I'm probably the world's worst chemist. However, by a series of successive liquations, I hope to separate out fractions that I can use. Platinum melts somewhere around seventeen-fifty, tantalum about twenty-nine hundred, and tungsten not until 'way up around thirty-three, or four hundred--and that, by the way, means lots of grief. Of course, each fraction will probably be an alloy of one kind or another, but I think maybe I'll be able to make them do." "But mayn't that whole chunk be a pure metal?" "It's conceivable, but not probable. There, she's beginning to separate at just below eighteen hundred! Platinum group coming out now, I think--platinum, rhodium, iridium, and that gang, you know. While I'm doing this, you might be getting those five coils into exact resonance, if you want to." "Sure I want to," and Nadia made her way across to the short-wave oscillator and set to work. After an hour or so, bent over her delicate task, she began to twitch uneasily, then shrugged her shoulders impatiently. "What's the idea of staring at me so?" she broke out suddenly. "How do you expect me to tune these things up if you...." She stopped abruptly, mouth open in amazement, as she turned toward Stevens. He had not been looking at her, but he turned a surprised face from his own task at the sound of her voice. "Excuse me, please, Steve. I don't know what's the matter with me--must be getting jumpy, I guess." "I wish that was all, but it isn't!" Face suddenly grim and hard, Stevens leaped to the communicator plate and shot the beam out into space. "There's an answer, but that isn't it. You're a fine-tuned instrument yourself, ace, and you've detected something.... I thought so! There's the answer--the guy that was looking at you!" Plainly there was revealed upon the plate a small, spherical space-ship, very like the one that had attacked and destroyed the _Arcturus_. After Nadia had taken one glance at it, Stevens shut off the power and leaped out into the shop. He closed all the bulkhead doors and air-break openings, then closed and secured the massive insulating door of the lifeboat in which they had made their headquarters. Then, after they had again put on the space-suits they had taken off such a short time before, he extinguished all the lights and hooded the communicator screen before he ventured again to glance out into the void. "If I had a brain in my head, instead of the pint of bean soup I've got up there, we'd have worn these when they cut up the _Arcturus_, and saved us a lot of mental wear and tear," he remarked. "They were right there in the lockers all the time, and I knew it!" "Well, we got away, anyway. You couldn't be expected to think of everything at once. We didn't have much time, you know."