* * * * * So there it was. A couple of hours later I was sitting in my cubby-hole, still fuming over how the Holy Bonds of Matrimony had changed a once vivid and daring spaceman into a vapid and scary yes-man, when there came a knock on the door. "If you owe me money," I growled, "come in! If vice versa, there's nobody home but us amperes!" The door eased open, and it was Biggs. His face was sober. He said, "Sparks, can I talk to you for a minute?" "Why don't you ask Gilchrist?" I snorted. "He gives the orders around here." He closed the door behind him, snapped the safety. "It's about Gilchrist I wanted to talk--" "Then do your talking," I advised him rudely, "somewhere else. If I never hear that skunk's name again, it will be too soon." "Don't be hasty, Sparks. He's not a bad chap. Just a trifle headstrong, maybe--" "Some people," I scorned, "like spiders. There's no accounting for tastes. Headstrong? You could use that skull of his to split granite. And _you_--" My indignation rose as I talked--"you're as bad as he is! Feeding him the good old soft-soap till it ran out of his ears!" "It doesn't pay," said Biggs in that peculiar, soft, schoolmarm fashion he sometimes affects, "to antagonize folks you have to get along with. Whether we like it or not, Major Gilchrist has senior authority on this ship. But we can talk about that some other time, Sparks. This is what I wanted to show you--" And he hauled a plot-chart from his pocket, gazed at me anxiously as I scanned it. Well, you know how plot-charts are. Nothing but one solid mess of figures, figures, figures. Trajectory, flight-velocity, loft and acceleration computations--all that junk. They're about as easy to read as the shorthand scribblings of an illiterate Choctaw. I passed it back. I said: "Looks O.Q. to me. Why the corrugated forehead?" "Look again, Bert," demanded Biggs. "Look carefully at those trajectory co-ordinates. I may be wrong, and I don't want to influence your opinion by saying anything, but--" This time I got it. The figures joined together and formed a picture in my mind, a picture that startled me worse than a surrealist drawing. I gasped: "_Sol!_" * * * * * Biggs nodded. "Mm-hmm. That's what I thought, too. The course he plotted skirts the Sun. Swings past it at a distance of only ten million miles!" I'm a lot of things--but one of the things I am _not_ is unresponsive to suggestion. I broke out in a hectic sweat and started for the door. "Oh, no!" I yelped. "Maybe _he'd_ like to play pussy-wants-a-corner with the prominences, but not _me_! The nearest I want to get to any corona is to smoke one! The guy's nuts! I'm going to tell him--" But Biggs grabbed my arm. "It's no use, Sparks. I've already told him." "You--you have?" "Yes. And he said--" Biggs' larynx performed some incredible involutions--"he said he knew perfectly well what he was doing."