Scyth opened his eyes wearily, but with a trace of bitter humor he managed to say, "You take care--of one another--and I'll drive!" Then Scyth passed out cold. * * * * * Four hours' drive into the foothills, far from the lights of civilization, Dusty found the big spacecraft. It was parked in a small valley and it was colored so that only a man who knew what he was seeking and where it was would have found it. On the way Scyth babbled about the drive and how to run the big ship. Happily, Scyth's periods of delirium were easy to separate from his periods of lucidity, for when Scyth began to babble he talked cynically about the stupidity of taking four hours to travel less than a couple of hundred miles when they could cover light-years in the matter of minutes. Then he would become quite rational and tell Dusty how to recognize the beacons as they came into sight, and where the charts were. He had to get back to Marandis, and he told Dusty the way. Then his mind would wander a bit and Scyth would chuckle quietly over something entirely removed from spacemanship. Then would come a discussion of the levers that must be turned and the meters that must be watched; how to turn the correct knob or to push the proper pedal. He spoke of cautions, too. They must not turn on the space drive until the ship had warmed for a certain length of time (which the menslator interpreted to Dusty as a vague quantity of minutes. To be safe, Dusty would wait twice that long) and then Scyth would lapse again. But as the drive went on, Scyth's periods of lucidity waned. His moments of babbling dropped too; and between them both came longer and longer periods of dead silence and heavy breathing. Yet by the time Dusty drove his car underneath one tailfin, he had a fair idea of how to run the spacecraft. VIII Dusty carried Scyth to the salon and dropped him on a divan. He left Barbara to take care of the Marandanian while he went aloft into the control room to take over. Once inside the room Dusty stopped short. He was a Hottentot in a powerhouse, a savage in a Plutonium refining plant, a tone-deaf idiot standing before a four-console organ. There were meters and switches and levers and toggles, neatly mounted on gleaming black panels and clearly lettered in shining white. He stared at a pilot lamp labeled :æ:*œæ;œ*œ and wondered foolishly whether the gleam of red meant that the spaceport was still open or whether it signaled that smoking was forbidden for the time being. [Illustration: He was a Hottentot in a power house, a savage in a Plutonium refining plant.] And Dusty was supposed to drive this.