hing."

Ren heard his words. He had a sudden, crazy thought that it was his own
voice, and that he, as he sped along through the ship, was in reality
Ford Gratrick. The thought startled him. He promptly forgot it.

There was a frown of concentration on his face. He was trying to
visualize a gravity pull whose intensity was not a single-valued
pressure but a uniform continuum of pressure values from a minimum to a
maximum.

It was like--well, like having an air pressure in a car tire that wasn't
thirty pounds or thirty-two pounds, but every value from zero to
thirty-five pounds.

It was like transforming the points and intervals on a line to a domain
where there had previously been only points!

* * * * *

Hugh Dunnam was waiting for him when he arrived in the pilot room. His
iron grey hair was mussed from exasperated hair-pulling. He jabbed a
finger in the direction of the automatic pilot without speaking.

Ren saw that it had been cut out. The first mate was controlling the
ship manually. The robot mechanism was still turning out its data
sheets, however. In five minutes Ren saw that the only consistent detail
was the distance of the ship from the planet.

Commander Dunnam watched him silently for several minutes. Finally Ren
laid down the data sheets and looked at him with a slow smile.

"Well?" Dunnam asked.

"It reminds me of a kid I knew quite well when I was in grade school,"
Ren said. "He was an incurable liar, so you could never take anything he
said, but always had to figure out the truth yourself and act on it
regardless of what he might claim to be the truth."

"You mean the instruments have all become liars?" Hugh Dunnam asked,
amazed at the idea.

"No," Ren replied. "I don't think that. I think nature is the liar, in a
way. I mean she is according to our standards. We'll have to outguess
her, that's all."

"Now you're cooking," Hugh exclaimed. "What would you suggest?"

"We know this planet has gravity," Ren replied. "There's no way of
knowing how much or how little. Suppose we kill our tangential speed and
just fall in? The gravity will take care of that, regardless of its
value or set of values."

"But we'll crash!" Hugh objected.

Ren took one of the report sheets and figured rapidly on its back.

"Unless I'm radically wrong," he said, "our speed of impact will be
every speed from zero to a thousand miles a minute. Not only that, no
matter how we try t