aller sections of the streak at the
proper times, they managed to get a good, solid image. But to get it
bright enough was another problem; they were only picking up a fraction
of the light, and it had to be amplified greatly to make a visible
image.

When they finally got what they were looking for, Morey gazed steadily
at the image. "Now the job is to figure the distance. And we haven't got
much parallax to work with."

"If we compute in the timing in our blinker system at opposite sides of
the orbit, I think we can do it," Arcot said.

They went to work on the problem. When Fuller and Wade showed up, they
were given work to do--Morey gave them equations to solve without
telling them to what the figures applied.

Finally Arcot said: "Their period about the common center of gravity is
thirty-nine hours, as I figure it."

Morey nodded. "Check. And that gives us a distance of two million miles
apart."

"Just what are you two up to?" asked Fuller. "What good is another star?
The one we're interested in is this freak underneath us."

"No," Arcot corrected, "we're interested in getting _away_ from the one
beneath us, which is an entirely different matter. If we were midway
between this star and that one, the gravitational effects of the two
would be cancelled out, since we would be pulled as hard in one
direction as the other. Then we'd be free of both pulls and could
escape!

"If we could get into that neutral area long enough to turn on our space
strain drive, we could get away between them fast. Of course, a lot of
our energy would be eaten up, but we'd get away.

"That's our only hope," Arcot concluded.

"Yes, and what a whale of a hope it is," Wade snorted sarcastically.
"How are you going to get out to a point halfway between these two stars
when you don't have enough power to lift this ship a few miles?"

"If Mahomet can not go to the mountain," misquoted Arcot, "then the
mountain must come to Mahomet."

"What are you going to do?" Wade asked in exasperation. "Beat Joshua? He
made the sun stand still, but this is a job of throwing them around!"

"It is," agreed Arcot quietly, "and I intend to throw that star in such
a way that we can escape between the twin fields! We can escape between
the hammer and the anvil as millions of millions of millions of tons of
matter crash into each other."

"And you intend to swing that?" asked Wade in awe as he thought of the
spectacle there would be when two suns fe