only a
sledge-hammer blow would have bent them under any circumstances, let
alone breaking them. But the tremendously powerful main generator was
split wide open. And the mechanical damage was awful. The prow of the
ship had been driven deep into the machine, and the power room was a
wreck.

"And," pointed out Morey, "we can't handle a job like that. It will take
a tremendous amount of machinery back on a planet to work that stuff,
and we couldn't bend that bar, let alone fix it."

"Get the coffee, will you please, Morey? I have an idea that's bound to
work," said Arcot looking fixedly at the machinery.

Morey turned and went to the galley.

Five minutes later they returned to the corridor, where Arcot stood
still, looking fixedly at the engine room. They were carrying small
plastic balloons with coffee in them.

They drank the coffee and returned to the control room, and sat about,
the terrestrians smoking peacefully, the Ortolian and the Talsonian
satisfying themselves with some form of mild narcotic from Ortol, which
Zezdon Afthen introduced.

"Well, we have a lot more to do," Arcot said. "The air-apparatus stopped
working a while back, and I don't want to sit around doing nothing while
the air in the storage tanks is used up. Did you notice our friends, the
enemy?" Through the great pilot's window the bulk of the Thessian ship's
bow could be seen. It was cut across with an exactitude of mathematical
certainty.

"Easy to guess what happened," Morey grinned. "They may have wrecked us,
but we sure wrecked them. They got half in and half out of our space
field. Result--the half that was in, stayed in. The half that was out
stayed out. The two halves were instantaneously a billion miles apart,
and that beautifully exact surface represents the point our space cut
across.

"That being decided, the next question is how to fix this poor old
wreck." Morey grinned a bit. "Better, how to get out of here, and down
to old Neptune."

"Fix it!" replied Arcot. "Come on; you get in your space suit, take the
portable telectroscope and set it up in space, motionless, in such a
position that it views both our ship and the nose of the Thessian
machine, will you, Wade? Tune it to--seven-seven-three." Morey rose with
Arcot, and followed him, somewhat mystified, down the passage. At the
airlock Wade put on his space suit, and the Ortolian helped him with it.
In a moment the other three men appeared bearing the machine. It was
p