ow what to
do and how to do it. I can handle your Operators and get the job done.
However, I can't handle either of you, since you both out-Gunther me,
and I'm not going to try to. But there can't be two bosses on any one
job, to say nothing of three or seventeen. So either I run the job or I
don't. If either of you steps in, I step out and don't come back in. And
remember that you're not doing us any favors--it's strictly vice versa."

"Jim!" Lola protested. Fao's hackles were very evidently on the rise;
Delcamp's face was hardening. "Don't be so rough, Jim, _please_. That's
no way to...."

"If you can pretty this up, pet, I'll be glad to have you say it for me.
Here's what you have to work on. If I do the job they'll have their
starship in a few weeks. The way they've been going, they won't have it
in twenty-five years. And the only way to get that bunch out there to
really work is to tell each one of them to cooperate or else--and
enforce the 'or else.'"

"But they'd quit!" Delcamp protested. "They'll _all_ quit!"

"With suspension or expulsion from the Society the consequences?
Hardly." James said.

"But you wouldn't do that--you couldn't."

"I wouldn't?"

"Of course he wouldn't," Lola put in, soothingly, "except as a very last
resort. And, even at worst, Jim could build it almost as easily with
common labor. You Primes don't really _have_ to have any Operators at
all, you know; but all your Operators together would be perfectly
helpless without at least one Prime."

"How come?" and "In what way?" Delcamp and Fao demanded together.

"Oh, didn't you know? After the ship is built and the fields are charged
and so on, everything has to be activated--the hundred and one things
that make it so nearly alive--and that is strictly a Prime's job. Even
Jim can't do it."

"I see ... or, rather, I don't see at all," Fao said, thoughtfully. She
was no longer either excited or angry. "A few weeks against twenty-five
years ... what do you think of his time estimate, Deg my dear?"

"I hadn't thought it would take nearly that long; but this 'activation'
thing scares me. Nothing in my theory even hints at any such thing.
So--if there's so much I don't know yet, even in theory, it would take a
long time. Maybe I'd never get it."

"Well, anyway, I want our _Celestial Queen_ done in weeks, not years,"
Fao said, extending her hand to James and shaking his vigorously. "So I
promise not to interfere a bit. If I feel any such