Part 4

Tet'h and Thani held a quick conference. "She come, too?" he asked.

"All of you."

"No. They stay. We go Terra."

"Terra!" exploded Hammond.

"Much to learn--both of us. You and I. You learn Telfan. We learn Terran. Better talk. This ... lousy."

"Easy to see Sandra's delicate hand in this language lesson," grinned Timkins.

"Better call that wild woman. Tell her we're going to take off in one hour and ten minutes because if we don't, we'll be as stuck as she is and we don't like that. As long as we have a bit of Telfu to take back with us in the shape of Tet'h and his woman Thani, we needn't stick around. I'll feel better about getting off on this rotation anyway. G'wan, we'll listen to you make the excuses, Larry."

"My turn to poke her on the pretty little schnozzola?"

"You won that by that three times something to the minus umpty-umpth power percentage of landing error. Twelve feet in what?"

"2,630,000,000,000,000,000 feet."

"Was that the same he said before?" asked McBride with a smile. "Or was he working that old gag about our not remembering?"

"I don't remember either."

"So, you win," said McBride to Larry Timkins.

* * * * *

Timkins called, and Sandra Drake's slightly hysterical voice replied.

"How you doing?" asked Larry.

"Where are you?"

"I don't know."

"Don't know?" said Sandra. Her voice went up in a crescendo and hit "G" above High "C" on the last note.

"No," said Larry. "Chicago, Venuland, Canalport, and Sharon are my best landmarks and they're all equally distant and in the same direction from here."

"Go to hell."

"That's across the River Styx from Sharon, on Pluto," said Timkins. "And that expression is making the Sharonites unhappy because people have been going there for thousands of years. Sharon hasn't the popularity."

"But look, Larry, I want to go along."

"Can you get here in one hour and eleven minutes. That's the absolute deadline until we can get to Terra and cook up a drive that's detuned enough from the cupralum-absorption region to permit us to tinker off and on around here."

"Where are you? How can I get there if you don't know where you are?"

"Ask someone."

Sandra's language became something that the communications commission has legislated against.

"Can you come here and get me?"

"We'll be doing fine if we get off with our skin," said Larry. "We definitely have not enough power to go roaming all over Telfu. We're on the one spot that will allow us to leave under the emergencies. An hour and thirty minutes from now that spot will be somewhere else. We'll wait an hour and ten and take off on the edge of the spot."

"Won't they come back and get me?"

"Wait a minute." Then he turned to Tet'h. "Could you send them back for Drake?"

"Yes," answered Tet'h. "Better not, though. She bad ... but lazy. Teach Terran so not ... learn Telfan."

"Sandra? No dice. That's it, toots. Take it or leave it."

"Look, Larry, isn't there something you can do?"

"I doubt it. Give you a tip, though. Next time you poke someone else's nose into a mess remember that he who laughs last isn't always too dumb to catch on quick. At the next sound, it will be exactly three people making with deep belly laughs. So long, until we meet again--in about six months! In-you, we're at these Telfan co-ordicidentally, if you should find someone who would like to get rid of nates: South Longitude.... Hey, Tet'h, how do you pronounce these figures?"

Tet'h caught his meaning and said: "Me tell."

He addressed the microphone, and spoke in Telfan. "There," he finished, "is where ... are!"

Timkins added: "So now you can get here all right."

He closed the mike as the speaker started to make little animal sounds. "Fellows," said Larry. "She's mad!"

"Crazy mad or angry mad?"

"Boiling mad."

"She'll be hard-boiled by the time she gets through stewing in her own juice," grinned Hammond. "Let's get some sky, fellows. O.K. ... we go?" he asked Tet'h.

"We go," said Tet'h cheerfully.

There was a quick conference between the two men who were to stay and Tet'h. Then the air-lock door was closed, and Timkins started to set up the controls.

Up in the emergency room, the batteries started to fume and fret as the terrible overload hit them. The _Haywire Queen_ lifted uncertainly, gained a little speed, and then took off into the cloudless sky at an acceleration that varied continuously between nine to twenty feet per second per second per second under the super drive.

Not too long after, the gravitron-cupralum drive took over, and the _Haywire Queen_ pointed her dome upwards at tiny Sol, blinking there in the sky between the constellations Aquila and Ophiuchus.

THE END.