ot_ do so, now or subsequently,
if you make the drop when we give the signal and if you remain on your
present course until then. Afterwards you will be at liberty to reverse
your course and escape as best you may. Let me re-emphasize that when
you told me you had taken over for Grayl I accepted that assertion in
full faith and still so accept it. Is that all fully understood?"

We all told him "Yes," though I don't imagine we sounded very happy
about it, even Pop. However I did get that funny feeling again that the
voice was being really sincere--an illusion, I supposed, but still a
comforting one.

Now while all these things were going on, believe it or not, and while
the plane continued to bullet through the orange haze--which hadn't
shown any foreign objects in it so far, thank God, even vultures, let
alone "straight strings of pink stars"--I was receiving a cram course in
gunnery! (Do you wonder I don't try to tell this part of my story
consecutively?)

* * * * *

It turned out that Alice had been brilliantly right about one thing: if
you pushed some of the buttons simultaneously in patterns of five they
unlocked and you could play on them like organ keys. Two sets of five
keys, played properly, would rig out a sight just in front of the
viewport and let you aim and fire the plane's main gun in any forward
direction. There was a rearward firing gun too, that you aimed by
changing over the World Screen to a rear-view TV window, but we didn't
get around to mastering that one. In fact, in spite of my special
talents it was all I could do to achieve a beginner's control over the
main gun, and I wouldn't have managed even that except that Alice, from
the thinking she'd been doing about patterns of five, was quick at
understanding from the voice's descriptions which buttons were meant.
She couldn't work them herself of course, what with her stump and burnt
hand, but she could point them out for me.

After twenty minutes of drill I was a gunner of sorts, sprawled in the
right-hand kneeling seat and intently scanning the onrushing orange haze
which at last was beginning to change toward the bronze of evening. If
something showed up in it I'd be able to make a stab at getting a shot
in. Not that I knew what my gun fired--the voice wasn't giving away any
unnecessary data.

Naturally I had asked why didn't the voice teach me to fly the plane so
that I could maneuver in case of attack, and