?"

Wayne shook his head wearily. "No," he agreed. "It doesn't matter now."

Sheilah moved away from the control board and came toward him. In her
filmy, transparent costume, she was the quintessence of womanly allure.

Wayne gasped and stared, but not at her.

The view screen had become visible when she'd moved.

It showed earth.

Or a curved, cloud-veiled slice of earth. Intact, serene and growing
steadily larger.

"What the hell! Why, I thought ..." Wayne jumped to his feet, brushed
past Sheilah and peered more closely at the view plate. There was no
mistaking it. Earth.

"What's a matter with you, mister?" Sheilah asked.

Wayne felt dizzy. O'Reilly had said, "Earth blasted away," hadn't he?
And the H-bomb hadn't destroyed the Cirissin ship. Therefore ... Well,
therefore what?

In the first place what O'Reilly had actually said was, "Rid of earth
now. Blasted away." It wasn't quite the same as ...

O'Reilly had never said anything about _destroying_ earth.

Quite a sizeable re-evaluation project was taking place in Wayne's mind.
It took several minutes for all the pieces to fall into their proper
places. But once he was willing to realize that the Cirissins had known
what they were doing, everything seemed obvious.

"Oh, good Gawd!" he muttered. "What utter idiots!"

"The Cirissins?" Sheilah asked.

"No, I mean us. Me. Good Lord, just because O'Reilly's English wasn't
perfect! What did I expect for only three weeks? Hummm. The atomic
structure of the entire ship must be uniformly charged to ... Damn! High
dragon bump!"

"I don't getcha," Sheilah said. "What's with this high dragon bump
business? I thought they wanted a hydrogen bomb to destroy earth, and I
thought you'd agreed to help 'em, and so I thought ..."

"Oh, never mind," Wayne said. "I know what you thought, and you weren't
any more stupid than I was. We were both wrong.

"Look, the Cirissins must have been stalled--out of gas, sort of.
Something had gone wrong with their nuclear drive units. They had some
emergency fuel, but they didn't want to use it. Like having a can of
kerosene in the car when the tank runs dry, I suppose. It will work, but
it messes up the engine. You understand so far?"

"Sure."

"Okay then. They happened to be close to earth, so they went into an
orbit around it and studied it for a while on radio and TV bands, and
realized they might be able to get help without using their emergency
fuel--uranium, incidenta