What should be Phoenix was off to the right; another city-Flagstaff?- farther away, north and a bit east; we appeared to be headed home. There was no glowing cloud on the horizon. "Jake, where are we?"

"Captain, I've never been in this universe. We translated ten quanta positive Tau axis. So we should be in analogous space close to ours-ten minimum intervals or quanta."

"This looks like Arizona."

"I would expect it to, Captain. You recall that one-quantum translation on this axis was so very like our own world that Deety and I confused it with our own, until she picked up a dictionary."

"Phone book, Pop."

"Irrelevant, dear. Until she missed the letter 'J' in an alphabetical list. Ten quanta should not change geological features appreciably and placement of cities is largely controlled by geography."

"Approaching three klicks, Boss." -

"Thanks, Gay. Hold course and H-above-G. Correction! Hold course and absolute altitude. Confirm and execute."

"Roger Wilco, Zeb."

I had forgotten that the Grand Canyon lay ahead-or should. "Smart Girl" is smart, but she's literal-minded. She would have held height-above-ground precisely and given us the wildest roller-coaster ride in history. She is very flexible but the "garbage-in-garbage-out" law applies. She had many extra fail-safes-because I make mistakes. Gay can't; anything she does wrong is my mistake. Since I've been making mistakes all my life, I surrounded her with all the safeguards I could think of. But she had no program against wild rides-she was beefed up to accept them. Violent evasive tactics had saved our lives two weeks ago, and tonight as well. Being too close to a fireball can worry a man-to death.

"Gay, display map, please."

The map showed Arizona-our Arizona; Gay does not have in her gizzards any strange universes. I changed course to cause us to pass over our cabin site-its analog for this space-time. (Didn't dare tell her: "Gay, take us home!"-for reasons left as an exercise for the class.) "Deety, how long ago did that bomb go off?"

"Six minutes twenty-three seconds. Zebadiah, was that really an A-bomb?"

"Pony bomb, perhaps. Maybe two kilotons. Gay Deceiver."

"I'm all ears, Zeb."

"Report time interval since radar-ranging beacon."

"Five minutes forty-four seconds, Zeb."

Deety gasped. "Was I that far off?"

"No, darling. You reported time since flash. I didn't ask Gay to range until after we were hypersonic."

"Oh. I feel better."

"Captain," inquired Jake, "how did Gay range an atomic explosion? I would expect radiation to make it impossible. Does she have instrumentation of which I am not aware?"

"Copilot, she has several gadgets I have not shown you. I have not been holding out-any more than you held out in not telling me about guns and ammo you-"

"My apologies, sir!"

"Oh, stuff it, Jake. Neither of us held out; we've been running under the whip. Deety, how long has it been since we killed that fake ranger?"

"That was seventeen fourteen. It is now twenty-two twenty. Five hours six minutes,"

I glanced at the board; Deety's "circadian clock" apparently couldn't be

jarred by anything; Gay's clock showed 0520 (Greenwich) with "ZONE PLUS SEVEN" display. "Call it five hours-feels like five weeks. We need a vacation."

"Loud cheers!" agreed Sharpie.

"Check. Jake, I didn't know that Gay could range an atomic blast. Light 'beacon' means a visible light to her just as 'radar beacon' means to her a navigational radar beacon. I told her to get a bearing on the light beacon directly aft; she selected the brightest light with that bearing. Then I told her to take radar range and bearing on it-spun my prayer wheel and prayed.

"There was 'white noise' possibly blanketing her radar frequency. But her own radar bursts are tagged; it would take a very high noise level at the same frequency to keep her from recognizing echoes with her signature. Clearly she had trouble for she reported 'plus-minus' of six hundred meters. Nevertheless range and bearing matched a fix in her permanents and told us our cabin had been bombed. Bad news. But the aliens got there too late to bomb us. Good news."

"Captain, I decline to grieve over material loss. We are alive."

"I agree-although I'll remember Snug Harbor as the happiest home I've ever had. But there is no point in trying to warn Earth-our Earth-about aliens. That blast destroyed the clincher: that alien's cadaver. And papers and drawings you were going to turn over to your Finnish friend. I'm not sure we can go home again."

"Oh, that's no problem, Captain. Two seconds to set the verniers. Not to mention the 'deadman switch' and the program in Gay's permanents."

"Jake, I wish you would knock off 'Captain' other than for command conditions."

"Zeb, I like calling you 'Captain."

"So do I!-my Captain."

"Me, too, Cap'n Zebbie!"

"Don't overdo it. Jake, I didn't mean that you can't pilot us home; I mean we should not risk it. We've lost our last lead on the aliens. But they know who we are and have shown dismaying skill in tracking us down. I'd like to live to see two babies born and grown up."

"Amen!" said Sharpie. "This might be the place for it. Out of a million billion zillion earths this one may be vermin-free. Highly likely."

"Hilda my dear, there are no data on which to base any assumption."

"Jacob, there is one datum."

"Eh? What did I miss, dear?"

"That we do know that our native planet is infested. So I don't want to raise kids on it. If this isn't the place we're looking for, let's keep looking."

"Mmm, logical. Yes. Cap- Zeb?"

"I agree. But we can't tell much before morning. Jake, I'm unclear on a key point. If we translated back to our own earth now, where would we find ourselves? And when?"

"Pop, may I answer that?"

"Go ahead, Deety."

"The time Pop and I translated to the place with no 'J' we thought we had failed. Pop stayed in our car, trying to figure it out. I went inside, intending to fix lunch. Everything looked normal. But the phone book was on the kitchen counter and doesn't belong there. That book had a toll area map on its back cover. My eye happened to land on 'Juab County'-and it was spelled 'luab'- and I thought, 'What a funny misprint!' Then I looked inside and couldn't find any 'J's' and dropped the book and went running for Pop."

"I thought Deety was hysterical. But when I checked a dictionary and the Britannica we got out in a hurry."

"This is the point, Zebadiah. When we flipped back, I dashed into the house. The phone book was where it belonged. The alphabet was back the way it ought to be. The clock in my head said that we had been gone twenty-seven minutes. The kitchen clock confirmed it and it agreed with the clock in the car. Does that answer you, sir?"

"I think so. In a translation, duration just keeps chugging along. I wondered because I'd like to check that crater after it has had time to cool down. What about that one rotation?"

"Harder to figure, Zebadiah. We weren't in that other space-time but a few seconds and we both passed out. Indeterminate."

"I'm convinced. But, Jake, what about Earth's proper motions? Rotation, revolution around the Sun, sidereal motion, and so forth."

"A theoretical answer calls for mathematics you tell me are outside your scope of study, uh-Zeb."

"Beyond my capacity, you mean."

"As you will, sir. An excursion elsewhere-and-elsewhen... and return... brings you back to where you would have been had you experienced that duration on earth. But 'when' requires further definition. As we were discussing, uh... earlier this afternoon but it seems longer, we can adjust the controls to reenter any axis at any point with permanent change of interval. For planetary engineering. Or other purposes. Including reentry reversed against the entropy arrow. But I suspect that would cause death."