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There was something wrong here, thought Grimes. The thing had considerable mass, otherwise it would never have shown so strongly in the screen of the MPI. The greater the mass, the greater the gravitational field. But, he told himself, there are more ways than one of skinning a cat. He actuated the steering jets, tried to nudge the rocket in towards its objective. "How am I doing, Pilot?" he asked.

"What are you trying to do, Captain?" countered von Tannenbaum. "The elements of the orbit are unchanged."

"Mphm." Perhaps more than a gentle nudge was required. Grimes gave more than a gentle nudge—and with no result whatsoever. He did not need to look at Beadle to know that the First Lieutenant was wearing his best I-told-you-so expression.

So . . .

So the situation called for brute strength and ignorance, a combination that usually gets results.

Grimes pulled the rocket away from the sphere, almost back to the ship. He turned it—and then, at full acceleration, sent it driving straight for the target. He hoped that he would be able to apply the braking jets before it came into damaging contact—but the main thing was to make contact, of any kind.

He need not have worried.

With its driving jet flaring ineffectually the rocket was streaking back towards Adder, tail first. The control box-was useless. "Slovotny!" barked Grimes. "Fire!"

There was a blinding flare, and then only a cloud of incandescent but harmless gases, still drifting towards the ship.

"And what do we do now, Captain?" asked Beadle. "Might I suggest that we make a full report to Base and resume our voyage?"

"You might, Number One. There's no law against it. But we continue our investigations."

Grimes was in a stubborn mood. He was glad that Adder was not engaged upon a mission of real urgency. These bags of Fleet Mail were not important. Revised Regulations, Promotion Lists, Appointments . . . If they never reached their destination it would not matter. But a drifting menace to navigation was important. Perhaps, he thought, it would be named after him. Grimes's Folly . . . He grinned at the thought. There were better ways of achieving immortality.

But what to do?

Adder hung there, and the thing hung there, rates and directions of drift nicely synchronized, and in one thousand seven hundred and fifty-three Standard years they would fall into or around Algol, assuming that Grimes was willing to wait that long—which, of course, he was not. He looked at the faces of his officers, who were strapped into their chairs around the wardroom table. They looked back at him. Von Tannenbaum—the Blond Beast—grinned cheerfully. He remarked, "It's a tough nut to crack, Captain—but I'd just hate to shove off without cracking it." Slovotny, darkly serious, said, "I concur. And I'd like to find out how that repulsor field works." Vitelli, not yet quite a member of the family, said nothing. Deane complained, "If the thing had a mind that I could read it'd all be so much easier . . ."

"Perhaps it's allergic to metal . . ." suggested von Tannenbaum. " We could try to bring the ship in towards it, to see what happens . . ."

"Not bloody likely, Pilot," growled Grimes. "Not yet, anyhow. Mphm . . . you might have something. It shouldn't be too hard to cook up, with our resources, a sounding rocket of all-plastic construction . . ."

"There has to be metal in the guidance system . . ." objected Slovotny.

"There won't be any guidance systems, Sparks. It will be a solid fuel affair, and we just aim it and fire it, and see what happens . . ."

"Solid fuel?" demurred Beadle. "Even if we had the formula we'd never be able to cook up a batch of cordite or anything similar . . ."

"There'd be no need to, Number One. We should be able to get enough from the cartridges for our projectile small arms. But I don't intend to do that."

"Then what do you intend, Captain?"

"We have graphite—and that's carbon. We've all sorts of fancy chemicals in our stores, especially those required