"By no means, my friend," Garlock said, cheerfully. "While your stuff isn't exactly like ours--it couldn't be, hardly; the field is so big and so new--that alone is no reason for it not to work. James can tell you. He's the Solar System's top engineer. What do you think, Jim?" "What I saw in the ship yesterday will work. What few of the prints I saw yesterday will fabricate, and the fabrications will work. The main trouble with this project, it seems to me, is that nobody's building the ship." "What do you mean by _that_ crack?" Fao blazed. "Just that. You're a bunch of prima donnas; each doing exactly as he pleases. So some of the stuff is getting done three or four times, in three or four different ways, while a lot of it isn't getting done at all." "Such as?" Delcamp demanded, and-- "Well, if you don't like the way we are doing things you can...." Fao began. "Just a minute, everybody." Lola came in, with a disarming grin. "How much of that is hindsight, Jim? You've built one, you know--and from all accounts, progress wasn't nearly as smooth as your story can be taken to indicate." "You've got a point there, Lola," Garlock agreed. "We slid back two steps for every three we took forward." "Well ... maybe," James admitted. "So why don't you, Fao and Deggi, put Jim in charge of construction?" Fao threw back her silvery head and glared, but Delcamp jumped at the chance. "Would you, Jim?" "Sure--unless Miss Talaho objects." "She won't." Delcamp's eyes locked with Fao's, and Fao kept still. "Thanks immensely, Jim. And I know what you mean." He went over to a cabinet of wide, flat drawers and brought back a sheaf of drawings. Not blueprints, but original drawings in pencil. "Such as this. I haven't even got it designed yet, to say nothing of building it." * * * James began to leaf through the stack of drawings. They were full of erasures, re-drawings, and such notations as "See sheets 17-B, 21-A, and 27-F." Halfway through the pile he paused, turned backward three sheets, and studied for minutes. Then, holding that one sheet by a corner, he went rapidly through the rest of the stack. "This is it," he said then, pulling the one sheet out and spreading it flat. "What we call Unit Eight--the heart of the drive." Then, tight-beamed to Garlock: "This is the thing that you designed _in toto_ and that I never could understand any part of. All I did was build it. It must generate those Prime fields." "Probably," Garlock flashed back. "I didn't understand it any too well myself. How does it look?" "He isn't even close. He's got only half of the constants down, and half of the ones he has got down are wrong. Look at this mess here...." "I'll take your word for it. I haven't your affinity for blueprints, you know, or your eidetic memory for them." "Do you want me to give him the whole works?" "We'll have to, I think. Or the ship might not work at all." "Could be--but how about intergalactic hops?"