vice physicians.

The intercom speaker squeaked once before Captain Quill's voice came
over it. "Mister Gabriel?"

"Yes, sir?" said Mike without turning around. There were no eyes in the
private quarters of the officers and crew.

"How is Mister Mellon?" A Space Service physician's doctorate is never
used as a form of address; three out of four Space Service officers have
a doctor's degree of some kind, and there's no point in calling 75 per
cent of the officers "doctor."

Mike glanced across the room. Keku had finished stripping the little
physician to his underclothes and had put a cover over him.

"He's still unconscious, sir, but his breathing sounds all right."

"How's his pulse?"

Keku picked up Mellon's left wrist and applied his fingers to the artery
while he looked at his wrist watch.

Mike said: "We'll check it, sir. Wait a few seconds."

Fifteen seconds later, Keku multiplied by four and said: "One-oh-four
and rather weak."

"You'd better get hold of the Physician's Mate," Mike told Quill. "He's
not in good condition, either mentally or physically."

"Very well. As soon as the mate takes over, you and Mister Keku get up
here. I want to know what the devil has been going on aboard my ship."

"You are bloody well not the only one," said Mike the Angel.

15

Midnight, ship time.

And, as far as the laws of simultaneity would allow, it was midnight in
Greenwich, England. At least, when a ship returned from an interstellar
trip, the ship's chronometer was within a second or two, plus or minus,
of Greenwich time. Theoretically, the molecular vibration clocks
shouldn't vary at all. The fact that they did hadn't yet been
satisfactorily accounted for.

Mike the Angel tried to make himself think of clocks or the variations
in space time or anything else equally dull, in the hope that it would
put him to sleep.

He began to try to work out the derivation of the Beale equations, the
equations which had solved the principle of the no-space drive. The ship
didn't move through space; space moved through the ship, which, of
course, might account for the variation in time, because--

--the time is out of joint.

_The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!_

_Hamlet_, thought Mike. _Act One, the end of scene five._

But why had he been born to set it right? Besides, exactly what was
wrong? There was something wrong, all right.

And why from the e