"Hashed again!" growled Breckenridge. "I must be losing my grip, I guess. I put everything I had on that sight, and missed it ten divisions. I think I'll turn in my badge--I've cocked our perfect curve already, before we got to the first check-station!" His hands moved toward the controls, to correct their course and acceleration. "As you were--hold everything! Lay off those controls!" snapped the computer. "There's something screwy, just as I thought--and it isn't you, either. I'm no pilot, of course, but I do know good compensation when I see it, and if you weren't compensating that point I never saw it done. Besides, with your skill and my figures I know darn well that we aren't off more than a tenth of one division. He's cuckoo! Don't call him--let him start it, and refer him to me." "All x--I'll be only too glad to pass the buck. But I still think, Steve, that you're playing with dynamite. Who ever heard of an astronomer being wrong?" "You'd be surprised," grinned the physicist, "Since this fuss has just started, nobody has tried to find out whether they were wrong or not...." "IPV _Arcturus_, attention!" came from the speaker curtly. "IPV _Arcturus_, Breckenridge," from the chief pilot. "You have been on my ray almost a minute. Why are you not correcting course and acceleration?" "Doctor Stevens is computing us and has full control of course and acceleration," replied Breckenridge. "He will answer you." "I am changing neither course nor acceleration because you are not in position," declared Stevens, crisply, "Please give me your present supposed location, and your latest precision goniometer bearings on the sun, the moon, Mars, Venus, and your Tellurian reference limb, with exact time of observations, gyroscope zero-planes, and goniometer factors!" "Correct at once or I shall report you to the Observatory," E2 answered loftily, paying no attention to the demand for proof of position. "Be sure you do that, guy--and while you're at it report that your station hasn't taken a precision bearing in a month. Report that you've been muddling along on radio loop bearings, and that you don't know where you are, within seven thousand kilometers. And speaking of reporting--I know already that a lot of you astronomical guessers have only the faintest possible idea of where you really are, _plus_, _minus_, or lateral; and if you don't get yourselves straightened out before we get to W41, I'm going to make a report on my own account that will jar some of you birds loose from your upper teeth!" He unplugged with a vicious jerk, and turned to the pilot with a grin. "Guess that'll hold him for a while, won't it?" "He'll report us, sure," remonstrated Breckenridge. The older man was plainly ill at ease at this open defiance of the supposedly infallible check-stations.