Her voice droned on. Travis found himself lost in contemplation of her. She looked like any girl you might see in the Chez Saturn or Planetary Park. She might be fussing over a jalanadon steak instead of a space-warper. If it weren't for her eyes ... so blue ... but so filled with that frightening knowledge, with wisdom, she'd make a guy a swell wife. He wondered how she kissed. "Now you must help me," she said, turning to him. She saw his abrupt change of expression and brooded at him. She shook her head suddenly and held out a small engine rigged with wheels and wires, with armatures and generator. "Attach it to the drive shaft, ahead of the combustion chambers." She showed him how, and explained its working. Travis didn't get the whole thing, but he understood enough to know that even the Chalmers rockets would be improved with this contraption. It smoothed the blastings of the jets, built them up on their own power. The ship would be like a bullet that, once shot from the gun, would receive another firing every ten feet. It was speed added to speed. Nuala smiled at his blank look, "Don't bother about whys and wherefors. Just let me handle things." * * * * * Travis grumbled under his breath, cramped under the jets and installing the super-blaster. It fretted his male pride to feel that a woman--even such a woman as Nuala--knew more about the workings of his own space-ship than he knew himself. He hit a Litson wrench against a fitting in anger. "All this talk of Rudra. The eternal werwile! Blah! How do I know there _is_ any such person?" The thought stopped him. He lay there in the cramped space between jet-sheathing and baffles and grinned at his own stupidity. "How do I know she's the one I came out here to find, even? I never saw her in the calyx!" Deep in the heart of him, he knew that Nuala was--Nuala. Her eyes told him that. He muttered, "Just the same, I don't have any proof about this werwile!" He crawled out of the rocket-room and stood up in the narrow corridor, wiping sweat from his eyes. Under his feet the floor quivered as the rockets thundered into life. Travis put a calloused hand on a wall-rail. The rockets blasted faster, turning the corridor into a maelstrom of sound. The ship was lifting, leaving the blackened planet and the ruined temples far below it. There was a sudden weightlessness to his body that told him they were out in space, now, slipping along with vertiginous speed. He clanked the lock on the rocket-chamber door and went to find Nuala. She was bent over the control panel, moving her white fingers across the dials. She did not look up when he came to a stop beside her. She merely said, "I'll have to take this all apart. Your wiring system is only 87 per cent efficient." "That's pretty good," Travis rasped, "On the first trampers that went to the moon, 35 per cent was hot stuff."