am Imagining it.

"_Gilgamesh_ crashed," he says. "Near as we can make out from the log,
she visited Seleucis system. That's a swarmer sun. Fifty-seven
planets, three settled; and any number of fragments. The navigator
calculated that after a few more revolutions one of the fragments was
going to crash on an inhabited planet. Might have done a lot of
damage. They decided to tow it out of the way.

[Illustration]

"Grappling-beams hadn't been invented. They thought they could use
Mass-Time on it a kind of reverse thrust--throw it off course.

"Mass-Time wasn't so well understood then. Bit off more than they
could chew. Set up a topological relation that drained all the free
energy out of the system. Drive, heating system--everything.

"She had emergency circuits. When the engines came on again they took
over--landed the ship, more or less, on the nearest planet. Too late,
of course. Heating system never came on--there was a safety switch
that had to be thrown by hand. She was embedded in ice when she was
found. Hull breached at one point--no other serious damage."

"And the ... the crew?"

Dillie ought to know better than that.

"Lost with all hands," says the colonel.

"How about weapons?"

We are all startled. Cray is looking whitish like the rest of us but
maintains his normal manner, i.e. offensive affection while pointing
out that _Gilgamesh_ can hardly be taken for a Menace unless she has
some means of aggression about her.

Lennie says The Explorer Class were all armed--

Fine, says Cray, presumably the weapons will be thoroughly obsolete
and recognizable only to a Historian--

Lennie says the construction of no weapon developed by the Space
Department has ever been released; making it plain that anyone but a
Nitwit knows that already.

Eru and Kirsty have been busy for some time writing notes to each
other and she now gives a small sharp cough and having collected our
attention utters the following Address.

"There is a point we seem to have missed. If I may recapitulate, the
idea is to take this ship _Gilgamesh_ to Incognita and make it appear
as though she had crashed there while attempting to land. I understand
that the ship has been buried in the polar cap; though she must have
been melted out if the people on _Crusoe_ examined the engines. Of
course the cold--All the same there may have been ... well ...
changes. Or when ... when we thaw the ship out again--"

I find I am swallowing goo