"He certainly did." Mr. Carver spoke as forcefully as he could, having already privately warned Jak to say nothing of his weakened condition. He looked solicitously over at his wife. "You all right, Marci?" "Yes, I feel fine, now that I've had this good consomme Jon was so thoughtful as to make." She smiled with real relief that they had all come through this dangerous experiment so successfully. Mr. Carver turned to Jon. "It feels like we're only at one gravity." "Yes, I rigged the automatics so they'd take care of that at the end of one hundred and twenty-five hours," the boy explained. "Probably it was the relief from pressure that woke us, as well as the wearing off of the stuff Jak gave us." Then he looked at his brother. "How come we're not famished after five days? That little glucose and stuff you gave us wouldn't last that long, would it?" "No, but the drug not only made us unconscious, but slowed down our metabolism so that we burned up hardly any energy." There was silence then while the four sipped their broth. Finally Mr. Carver looked up at Jak. "How soon can we go through this again?" "The book says the doctor gave as high as four doses to people, one right after the other as they woke up, with only a few hours' rest between them." "_Hmmm_, then we'd better take some time out. We'll all want baths, plenty of your mother's good cooking, and Jon and I will have to do some computing." "If Bogin holds his acceleration, plus and minus, we can take most of the day, and still beat him in." Jon had been doing some rapid preliminary figuring. "But it'll take a couple of hours--maybe more--to compute the last hop. It's tricky. Especially, I'll have to look in the ephemeris to find the position of Luna when we get near her orbit." "Right, we don't want to hit her. Well, we can keep at one gravity for at least twelve hours, then," his father said, and Mrs. Carver breathed a sigh of relief. She was still a bit worried about their undergoing such untried experiments, even though she trusted the abilities of her menfolks, and knew they had all come safely through the first time. "I'll make notes of all this, and ask each of you for your full reactions," Jak said animatedly. "Then when we get home I'll write up a complete report and send it to Dr. Svendholm. I'm sure he'll be tickled pink to get this added confirmation of his studies and experiments." "That's thoughtful of you, Son." His father smiled. "You're developing into a true research scientist." "He sure is!" His younger brother paid deserved tribute. Jak reddened a bit and hastily left the control room to help his mother with her work. They all took warm baths and changed their clothing. As Jak was helping his father, he asked anxiously, "Now that we're alone, Father, did you really come through all right? You look a bit more tired and worn than before we started this." "Sure, I'm OK," Mr. Carver said quickly, but he could not meet his son's eyes.