d be very difficulty to convey.

Diane's voice came out of the communicator.

"_There are no novelties outside_," she said quietly. "_It looks like
this is the only Plumie ship anywhere around. It could have been
exploring, like us. Maybe it was looking for the people who put up
Space-Survey markers._"

"Maybe," agreed Baird, using the communicator. "Is that stuff about
falling into the sun correct?"

"_It seems so_," said Diane composedly. "_I'm checking again. So far, the
best course I can get means we graze the sun's photosphere in fourteen
days six hours, allowing for acceleration by the sun's gravity._"

"And you and I," said Baird wryly, "have been acting as professional
associates only, when--"

"_Don't say it!_" said Diane shakily. "_It's terrible!_"

He put the communicator back in his pocket. The Plumie had watched him.
He had a peculiarly gallant air, this small figure in golden space armor
with its high-crested helmet.

They reached the engine room. And there was the giant drive shaft of the
_Niccola_, once wrapped with yard-thick coils which could induce an
incredible density of magnetic flux in the metal. Even the return
magnetic field, through the ship's cobalt-steel hull, was many times
higher than saturation. Now the coils were sagging: mostly melted. There
were places where re-solidified metal smoked noisomely against
nonmetallic floor or wall-covering. Engineers labored doggedly in the
trivial gravity to clean up the mess.

"It's past repair," said Baird, to the ship's first engineer.

"It's junk," said that individual dourly. "Give us six months and a place
to set up a wire-drawing mill and an insulator synthesizer, and we could
rebuild it. But nothing less will be any good."

The Plumie stared at the drive. He examined the shaft from every angle.
He inspected the melted, and partly-melted, and merely burned-out
sections of the drive coils. He was plainly unable to understand in any
fashion the principle of the magnetronic drive. Baird was tempted to try
to explain, because there was surely no secret about a ship drive, but he
could imagine no diagrams or gestures which would convey the theory of
what happened in cobalt-steel when it was magnetized beyond one hundred
thousand Gauss' flux-density. And without that theory one simply couldn't
explain a magnetronic drive.

They left the engine room. They visited the rocket batteries. The
generator room was burned out, like the drive, by the