He turned at the sound of the voice and saw the short, wiry figure of Dan Kelleher, the cargo chief. He frowned. "I guess we'll be crating from now till tonight without a stop," he said unhappily. Kelleher shook his head. "Wrong. There's really not very much work. But it's going to be cold going. All those chunks of dinosaur meat in the preserving hold are going to get packed up. It won't be fun." Alan agreed. He scanned the board, looking down the rows for the list of cargo crew. Sure enough, there was his name: _Donnell, Alan_, chalked in under the big double C. As an Unspecialized Crewman he was shifted from post to post, filling in wherever he was needed. "I figure it'll take four hours to get the whole batch crated," Kelleher said. "You can take some time off now, if you want to. You'll be working to make up for it soon enough." "I won't debate the point. Suppose I report to you at 0900?" "Suits me." "In case you need me before then, I'll be in my cabin. Just ring me." Once back in his cabin, a square cubicle in the beehive of single men's rooms in the big ship's fore section, Alan unslung his pack and took out the dog-eared book he knew so well. He riffled through its pages. _The Cavour Theory_, it said in worn gold letters on the spine. He had read the volume end-to-end at least a hundred times. "I still can't see why you're so wild on Cavour," Rat grumbled, looking up from his doll-sized sleeping-cradle in the corner of Alan's cabin. "If you ever do manage to solve Cavour's equations you're just going to put yourself and your family right out of business. Hand me my nibbling-stick, like a good fellow." Alan gave Rat the much-gnawed stick of Jovian oak which the Bellatrician used to keep his tiny teeth sharp. "You don't understand," Alan said. "If we can solve Cavour's work and develop the hyperdrive, we won't be handicapped by the Fitzgerald Contraction. What difference does it make in the long run if the _Valhalla_ becomes obsolete? We can always convert it to the new drive. The way I see it, if we could only work out the secret of Cavour's hyperspace drive, we'd----" "I've heard it all before," Rat said, with a note of boredom in his reedy voice. "Why, with hyperspace drive you'd be able to flit all over the galaxy without suffering the time-lag you experience with regular drive. And then you'd accomplish your pet dream of going everywhere and seeing everything. Ah! Look at the eyes light up! Look at the radiant expression! You get starry-eyed every time you start talking about the hyperdrive!" Alan opened the book to a dog-eared page. "I know it can be done eventually. I'm sure of it. I'm even sure Cavour himself actually succeeded in building a hyperspace vessel."