one _now_!"
He looked at his Maintenance Officer. "Smith, isn't there some way to
make contact between those two plugs?"

"Sure," Smith said bitterly. "If we had the tools, it would be duck
soup. All we'd have to do is trim down the male plug to fit the
female, and we'd have it. But we don't have the tools. We've got a
couple of files and a quarter-horsepower electric drill with one bit.
Everything else was in the tool compartment--which is long gone, with
the engine room."

"Can't you ... uh, what do you call it? Uh ... jury-something--"
Hull's voice sounded as though he were forcing it to be calm.

"Jury-rig?" Smith said. "Yeah? With what? Dammit, we haven't got any
tools, and we haven't got any materials to work with!"

"Can't you just use a wrench to tighten them more?" Hull asked
helplessly.

Smith said a dirty word and pushed himself away from the screamer unit
to glower at an unresisting wall.

"No, Mr. Hull, we couldn't," said Captain Al-Amin with restrained
patience. "That would strip the threads. If the electrical contact
were made at the same time, the high-pressure oxygen-hydrogen flow
would spark off, and we'd get a big explosion that would wreck
everything--including us." Then he muttered to himself: "I still don't
see how it could happen."

Jayjay Kelvin pulled a nine of spades from the back of the deck to the
front. It matched the four of spades that had come three cards
before. Jayjay discarded the two cards between the spades. "You
don't?" he asked. "Didn't you ever hear that the total is greater than
the sum of its parts?"

"What?" Captain Al-Amin sounded as though he'd been insulted--in
Arabic. "What are you talking about, Mr. Kelvin?"

"I'm talking about the idiocy of the checking system," Jayjay said
flatly. "Don't you see what they did? Don't you see what happened?
Each part of a screamer has to be checked separately, right?"

Al-Amin nodded.

"Why? Because the things burn out if you check them as a complete
unit. It's like checking a .50 caliber cartridge. The only way you can
check a cartridge is to shoot it in a gun. If it works, then you know
it works. Period. The only trouble is that you've wasted the
cartridge. You know that _that_ one is good, but you've ruined it.

"Same way with a screamer. If you test it as a unit, you'll ruin it.
So you test it a part at a time. All the parts check out nicely
because the test mechanisms are built to check each part."

Smith squinted. "