is device, but to him, alone
in his spacesuit, the galaxy spread around him, it was the weapon with
which he had conquered the stars.

In the distance, off beyond the wheel in a trailing orbit, the huge
spherical shape of Project Hot Rod glowed its characteristic
green--another application of the laser principle, but this one
macroscopic in comparison to the tiny laser rate-of-approach gun.

Happily, Paul burst into song.

_"There's a sky-trail leading from here to there
And another yonder showing;
But I've a yen for gravity--
This is where I wasn't going!"_

From the other side of the dump, Tombu's voice bellowed into his ears
over the intercom. "If you're going to audition for the stars, cut
down the volume!"

Paul grinned and reached for the volume control.

"O.K., M'Numba, 's m'numba!--I'm a space-yodler from way out. Heave a
line over this way and let's get this ECM lathe aboard."

Tombu's "last name" M'Numba had delighted Paul from the moment he'd
heard the story of its origin. By the customs of his own country,
Tombu had only a single name. However, when he had first enrolled as a
student in England there had been a lack of comprehension between him
and the rather flustered registrar and, when he had muttered something
about "my number," the registrar had misunderstood and put him down as
M'Numba. Tombu had let it stand.

Paul Chernov, fine-boned, blond, with an ancestral background of the
Polish aristocracy, and his side-kick, Tombu, black, muscular giant
from the Congo, were one of the strangest combinations of this
international space lab crew. Yet it was perhaps even stranger that
the delicate-looking blond youth was a top machinist, a trade that he
had plied throughout his student days in order to economically support
an insatiable thirst for knowledge. A trade that had led him to this
newest center of man's search for knowledge.

But perhaps the combination was not so strange, for Tombu, also, was
of the aristocracy--an aristocracy that could perhaps be measured in
terms of years extending far behind the comparable times for any
European aristocracy.

Tombu was Swahili, a minor king of a minor country which had never
been recognized by the white man when he invaded Africa and set up his
vast protectorates that took no account of the peoples and their
tribal traditions; protectorates that lumped together many hundreds of
individual nations and tribes into something the w