They took off immediately. "This time the box stays locked," he said, pointing at the lid dial which showed the tiny atomic power unit inside was keeping the core's contents at Kelvin 90. Then he radioed the mother ship for a directional beam and locked the craft on automatic pilot. He glanced thoughtfully at his assistant. "When we come in _I'll_ make the report." "But I know that's standard, Captain, I learned it the first month at the academy." "Just wanted to make sure you remembered. How do you feel, Will?" "Perfect." "No after effects! Same with me!" He thumped Cramer's back in a hail-fellow-well-met spirit and Cramer thought, _Not such a bad guy sometimes_. * * * * * But, of course, that little outburst of camaraderie had to stop short as soon as they debarked inside the mother ship. The _Solar Pioneer_ was strictly spit-and-polish, all twelve hundred feet of it, and as they came out of the scout craft hangar, there were brisk salutes to be exchanged and data registration books to countersign. General Chisholm, a natty man with brightly burnished swagger stick to match, was personally on hand to greet them. "Anything of interest to report, Captain?" he snapped. "Fairly routine, sir." He gave Cramer a silencing glance. "That's the trouble, Captain, the whole voyage has been. You're the last craft in so we're heading back to Earth now." Hartley held out the specimen box. "We spotted a good landing asteroid--one side flat as a mesa. Composition fairly similar to granite and mica." "Nothing else?" Cramer started to open his mouth but Hartley broke in; "Nothing, sir," he answered. "The white stuff, sir," said Cramer, holding chin and stomach in. The General glared directly at him. "You're out of order, Mister." "Yessi--" "Then don't say another word." He pulled out a little black book, made a notation and looked at Hartley as if no one else were there. "What's this about?" "Nothing important, sir. We didn't have the specimen box set cryogenically a few times and when the temperature went up to human normal in the compression cycle chamber little water crystals flew out." "Well, nothing unusual about that." "But, sir," Cramer protested, "they couldn't have been just water." "Silence!" Chisholm roared and two of his staff officers at the bend of a corridor turned to watch the fun. "Consider yourself under Probationary discipline, Mister Cramer. Informality's natural and permissible on a front-line craft like a scouter but chain of command has to be _absolute_ on a dreadnought, you know that." "I'm very sorry this happened, sir," Hartley apologized.