"I am honored to be in your house," Don said to him.

The dragon settled himself comfortably, letting his chin come about to their shoulders. "Not my house. These snobs wouldn't have me around if there wasn't a job I can do a little better than the next hombre. I just work here."

"Oh." Don wanted to defend Sir Isaac against the charge of snobbery but taking sides between dragons seemed unwise. He looked back at the tank. The scan had shifted to the circle of enamel which framed the "H"; fifteen or twenty degrees of it appeared in the tank. The magnification started to swell enormously until one tiny sector filled the huge picture. Again the solvent floated into the enamel; again it washed away.

"Now we are getting someplace, maybe," commented Joe.

The enamel was dissolving like snow in spring rain, but, instead of washing down to a bare floor, something dark was revealed under the paint-a bundle of steel pipes, it seemed to be, nested in the shallow groove.

There was dead silence-then somebody cheered. Don found that he had been holding his breath. "What is it?" he asked Joe.

"Wire. What would you expect?"

Sir Isaac stepped up the magnification and shifted to another sector. Slowly, as carefully as a mother bathing her first born, he washed the covering off the upper layer of the coiled wire. Presently a microscopic claw reached in, felt around most delicately, and extracted one end.

Joe got to his feet. "Got to get to work," he keyed. "That's my cue." He ambled down the ramp. Don noticed that he was growing a new starboardmidships leg and the process was not quite complete; it gave him a lopsided, one-flatwheel gait.

Slowly, tenderly, the wire was cleaned and uncoiled. More than an hour later the tiny hands of the micromanipulator stretched out their prize-four feet of steel wire so gossamer fine that it could not be seen at all by naked eye, even by a dragon.

Sir Isaac backed his head out of the eyepiece rack. "Is Malath's wire ready?" he inquired.

"All set."

"Very well, my friends. Let us commence."

They were fed into two ordinary microwire speakers, rigged in parallel. Seated at a control panel for synchronizing the fragmented message latent in the two wires was a worried-looking man wearing earphones-Mr. Costello. The steel spider threads started very slowly through-and a highpitched gabbling came out of the horn. There were very rapid momentary interruptions, like high frequency code.

"Not in synch," announced Mr. Costello. "Rewind."

An operator sitting in front of him said, "I hate to rewind, Jim. These wires would snap if you breathed on them."

"So you break a wire-Sir Isaac will splice it. Rewind!"

"Maybe you've got one in backwards."

"Shut up and rewind."

Presently the gabbling resumed. To Don it sounded the same as before and utterly meaningless, but Mr. Costello nodded. "That's got it. Was it recorded from the beginning?"

Don heard Joe's Texas accents answering, "In the can!"

"Okay, keep it rolling and start playing back the recording. Try slowing the composite twenty to one." Costello threw a switch; the gabbling stopped completely although the machines continued to unreel the invisible threads. Shortly a human voice came out of the loudspeaker horn; it was deep, muffled, dragging, and almost unintelligible. Joe stopped it and made an adjustment, started over. When the voice resumed it was a clear, pleasant, most careful enunciated contralto.

"Title," the voice said, " `Some Notes on the Practical Applications of the Horst-Milne Equations. Table of Contents: Part One-On the Design of Generators to Accomplish Strain-Free Molar Translation. Part Two-The Generation of SpaceTime Discontinuities, Closed, Open, and Folded. Part Three -On the Generation of Temporary Pseudo-Acceleration Loci. Part One, Chapter One-Design Criteria for a Simple Generator and Control System. Referring to equation seventeen in Appendix A, it will be seen that--' "

The voice flowed on and on,, apparently tireless. Don was interested, intensely so, but he did not understand it. He found himself growing sleepy when the voice suddenly rapped out: "Facsimile! Facsimile! Facsimile!"

Costello touched a switch, stopping the voice, and demanded, "Cameras ready?"

"Hot and rolling)"

"Shift!"

They watched the picture build up-a wiring diagram, Don decided it must be-or else a plate of spaghetti. When the picture was complete the voice resumed.

After more than two hours of this, broken only by desultory conversation, Don turned to Isobel. "I'm not doing any good here and I'm certainly not learning anything. What do you say we leave?"

"Suits."

They went down the ramp and headed for a tunnel that led toward living quarters. On the way they ran into Phipps, his face glowing with happiness. Don nodded and started to push on past; Phipps stopped him. "I was just going to hunt you up."

"Me?"

"Yes. I thought you might want this-for a souvenir." He held out the ring.

Don took it and examined it curiously. There was a very tiny break in one branch of the "H" where the enamel had been eaten away. The framing circle was an empty, slightly shadowed groove, a groove so narrow and shallow that Don could hardly catch his fingernail in it.

"You've no more use for it?"

"It's squeezed dry. Keep it. You'll be able to sell it to a museum some day, for a high price."

"No," said Don. "I reckon I'll deliver it to my father-eventually."

XVII To Reset the Clock

DON moved out of the Gargantuan chambers he had been given and in with the other humans. Sir Isaac would have let him stay until the Sun grew cold, monopolizing an acre or so of living space, but to Don it seemed not only silly for one person to clutter up chambers built big enough for dragons but not entirely comfortable-so much open space made a man tuned to bush fighting uneasy.

The human guests occupied one dragon apartment with the great rooms partitioned off into cubicles. They shared its wallowing trough as a plunge bath and had a communal mess. Don roomed with Dr. Roger Conrad, a tall and shaggy young man with a perpetual grin. Don was a bit surprised to find that Conrad was held in high esteem by the other scientists.

He saw very little of his roommate, nor of any of the others-even Isobel was busy with clerical work. The team worked night and day with driving intensity. The ring had been opened and they had engineering data to work from, true-but that task force was already swinging toward Mars. Nobody knew-nobody could know-whether or not they could finish in time to save their colleagues.

Conrad had tried to explain it to Don one night late as he was turning in. "We don't have adequate facilities here. The instructions were conceived in terms of Earth- and Mars-type techniques. The dragons do things differently. We've got mighty little of our own stuff and it's hard to jury-rig what we need from their stuff. The original notion was to install the gear in-you know those little jumpbug ships that people use to get around in on Mars?"

"Seen pictures of them."

"Never actually seen 'em myself. Useless as rocketships, of course, but they are pressurized and big enough. Now we've got to adapt for a shuttle." A superstratospheric shuttle "with its ears trimmed"-the spreading glider wings unshipped and carried awaywaited in a covered bayou outside Sir Isaac's family seat. It would make the trip to Mars if it could be prepared. "It's a headache," he added.

"Well, can we do it?"

"We'll have to do it. We can't possibly do the design calculations over again; we don't have the machines, even if we had time to re-engineer the job-which we haven't."