"Ask the bird that dropped it. I only picked it up. If I'd found it in a blue-clay flue, I'd have mined Soaky for fair, but a loose diamond lying on the surface is strictly a changeling. Soaky must have known high-falutin' friends in his younger and more promising days. Call it one of those inexplicable mysteries and forget it. I give up." "Hm-m-m. Might be more there, hey?" "Yeah, but the life of Telfu depends upon our getting rid of Soaky." Thani, who heard the latter part of the discussion, came over and looked at the uncut stone in wonder. "You will want to inspect our satellite?" she asked Hammond. "I'd like to," he said. "But we have no time. While we've never synthesized anything larger than fractional-karat diamonds, and this four to five karats worth of crystallized carbon will be worth a small fortune to Timkins, here, the idea of forestalling help to Telfu whilst we chase a will-of-the-wisp is strictly a phony. Besides, it looks to us as though this one was a sport--an impossible find. Chances are that Larry was extremely lucky." Thani shook her head. The chances of a huge fortune in precious stones going up the chimney because of danger to an alien race gave her food for thought. * * * * * McBride's shout cut all future conversation along this line. Hammond called for Larry to follow, and they went to the room in which the electrogravitic generator was being worked on. McBride met them. "We're about ready," he said. "There's peepholes for all." "Peepholes?" "Unless you want to be in an airless room along with umpty-gewhillion electron volts. Better take a peephole." McBride's hole was equipped with telescope and controls for the equipment. They set their eyes to the windows and watched. McBride explained: "First off, I open the space cock and let the vacuum of space in. Said vacuum drives the air out, leaving the place filled with hard nothing. That eliminates the possibility of corona with the voltages we are going to use." Then he depressed the generator-on control button, and the pilot lights winked. He read the meters through the telescope, and adjusted the variable controls until a faintly outlined sphere formed between the radiator gravitodes of the generator. This sphere was invisible in that it reflected no light and was transparent, but the light from the wall beyond was refracted slightly, and the sphere was constantly changing in index of refraction, so that the sphere shimmered like heat waves over a meadow. "We set the spherical warp, so. Now on the boom we insert the combustion tube containing the mix. The insertion of the boom is easy due to the heavy gravitic field, which attracts proportional to the square of the distance. I think it increases the inertia-constant--" "_Woah_, Mac. Inertia is a _property_ of matter, not a phenomenon."