n the house?"

* * * * *

For all Bruce's easiness, he was watching us like a golden eagle and he
caught Beau's and Maud's affirmatives before they had a chance to
explain or hedge them and said, "That's very good. Under certain
circumstances, you two'd be the ones to go to work on the chest. But
before we consider that, there's Question Three: Is anyone here an
atomics technician?"

That one took a little conversation to straighten out, Illy having to
explain that, yes, the Early Lunans had atomic power--hadn't they
blasted the life off their planet with it and made all those ghastly
craters?--but no, he wasn't a technician exactly, he was a "thinger" (I
thought at first his squeakbox was lisping); what was a thinger?--well,
a thinger was someone who manipulated things in a way that was truly
impossible to describe, but no, you couldn't possibly thing atomics; the
idea was quite ridiculous, so he couldn't be an atomics thinger; the
term was worse than a contradiction, well, really!--while Sevensee, from
his two-thousand-millennia advantage of the Lunan, grunted to the effect
that his culture didn't rightly use any kind of power, but just sort of
moved satyrs and stuff by wrastling space-time around, "or think em roun
ef we hafta. Can't think em in the Void, tho, wus luck. Hafta have--I
dunno wut. Dun havvit anyhow."

"So we don't have an A-tech," Bruce summed up, "which makes it worse
than useless, downright dangerous, to tamper with the chest. We wouldn't
know what to do if we did get inside safely. One more question." He
directed it toward Sid. "How long before we can jettison anything?"

Sid, looking a shade jealous, yet mostly grateful for the way Bruce had
calmed his chickens, started to explain, but Bruce didn't seem to be
taking any chance of losing his audience, and as soon as Sid got to the
word "rhythm," he pulled the answer away from him.

"In brief, not until we can effectively tune in on the cosmos again.
Thank you, Master Lessingham. That's at least five hours--two mealtimes,
as the Cretan officer put it," and he threw Kaby a quick soldierly
smile. "So, whether the bomb goes to Egypt or elsewhere, there's not a
thing we can do about it for five hours. All right then!"

His smile blinked out like a light and he took a couple of steps up and
down the bar, as if measuring the space he had. Two or three cocktail
glasses sailed off and popped, but he didn't seem to notice