voice. "Does that help you any?"

"I'm just trying to help!" Hull snapped. "You've got no call to get
sarcastic with me!"

Smith said the French word again.

"Enough!" the captain barked. "Smith, control your tongue! That sort
of thing won't help us." He jerked his head around. "Mr. Kelvin, do
you have any suggestions?"

Jayjay played another card. "No. Not yet. I'm thinking."

"Smith? Any ideas?" The tone of the Arab's voice left no doubt that he
meant business.

"No, sir. Without a properly equipped machine shop, there's nothing we
can do."

"How so?"

"Because that's a precision job, sir. The threads are tapered so that
the fit will be gas-tight. That's why the threads have a
ten-thousandth of an inch of soft polyethylene covering the hard
steel, so that when the threads are tight, the polyethylene will act
as a seal. Everything in that connection is a precision fitted job.
The ends of the tubes are made to be slightly mashed together, so that
the seals will be tight--they're coated with polyethylene, too. If the
oxygen and hydrogen mix, the efficiency of the fuel cell goes down to
zero, and you run the chance of an explosion."

"Show me," Al-Amin said.

Smith took a pencil out of his pocket and began drawing a cross
section of the connection on the top of the nearby table.

"Look here, captain, this is the way the two are supposed to fit. But
they don't, because the male plug can't get far enough into the female
socket to make the connection. Like this, see?"

The captain nodded.

"Well," Smith continued, "there's a thirty-second of an inch clearance
there. If the female had one more turn of thread, the fit would be
prefect. As it is, we get no connection. So the screamer doesn't
function."

Al-Amin looked at the drawing. "Odd that there's never been any
complaint about this error before."

Jayjay turned another ace. "Not so odd, really."

All heads turned toward Jayjay.

"What does that mean?" Smith asked.

"Just what I said." Jayjay turned another card. "A screamer is
supposed to call for help, isn't it? It's only used in a dire
emergency. Then the only test of the whole unit comes when the
occupants of the spaceship are in danger--as we are. If the things
don't work, how could there be any complaint? If we can't get ours to
work, will we complain? To whom?

"How many ships have been reported missing in the past year or so? All
of them presumed lost because of meteor strikes, eh? If a s