"Channing, until we get a stable place, you couldn't do a thing about trying to get help, so I suggest that you pitch in with Bennington, there, and help unscramble the wiring. You're a circuit man, and though power-line stuff is not your forte, you'll find that running a lighting circuit is a lot easier than neutralizing a microwave transmitter. Once we get light, you can help us haywire a control panel. Right?" "Right," said Channing. "And as far as contacting the folks back home goes, we couldn't do a darned thing until the time comes when we should be dropping in on Mojave. They won't be looking for anything from us until we're reported missing; then I imagine that Walt Franks will have everything from a spinthariscope to a gold-foil electroscope set up. Right now I'm stumped, but we have seventeen hours before we can start hoping to be detected. Tom, where do we begin?" Bennington smiled inwardly. To have Don Channing asking him for orders was like having Captain Johannson request the batteryman's permission to change course. "If you can find and remove the place where the shorted line is, and then splice the lighting circuit again, we'll have a big hunk of our work done. The rest of us will begin to take lines off of the pilot's circuits right here in the instrument room, so that our jury-controls can be hooked in. You'll need a suit, I think, because I'll bet a hat that the shorted circuit is in the well." For the next five hours, the instrument room became a beehive of activity. Men began coming in driblets, and were put to work as they came. The weightlessness gave quite a bit of trouble; had the instrument panels been electrically hot, it would have been downright dangerous, since it was impossible to do any kind of work without periodically coming into contact with bare connections. Tools floated around the room in profusion, and finally Hadley appointed one man to do nothing but roam the place to retrieve "dropped" tools. The soldering operations were particularly vicious, since the instinctive act of flinging excess solder from the tip of an iron made droplets of hot solder go zipping around the room to splash against something, after which the splashes would continue to float. Men who came in seeking to give aid were handed tools and told to do this or that, and the problem of explaining how to free a frozen relay to unskilled help was terrific. Then at the end of five hours, Channing came floating in to the instrument room. He flipped off the helmet and said to Hadley: "Make with the main switch. I think I've got it." Throughout the ship the lights blinked on.