He disrobed and hung the suits up and then went aft. Hours passed. The cat looked like he was asleep in the pilot chair but all I had to do was twitch and he opened a baleful eye.

I hit my head with my knuckles. I must think of some way to get out of this. Didn't I realize I was going to my death?

The cat snarled.

Heller came back on the flight deck. He had shaved and bathed and changed his clothes. Aside from the rather gloomy pallor he now wore, he looked rested.

"Corky," he said to the tug, "we don't want that mass to overshoot. Are you braking?"

"Yes, sir. I have a compression beam on it now and we have been slowing down for the last three hours."

"Good," said Heller. He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket and read some coordinates and speeds to the tug. It was at that moment that I realized with some horror that he was not wearing ordinary fatigue clothes: he was wearing a scarlet coverall the Fleet uses when near radiation.

"Is this ship alive?" I stammered.

"No, Corky is just a robot."

"Please! You don't get my meaning. Is the ship alive with radiation?"

"All this maneuvering will be eight hundred miles above the surface," he said. "That is within the magnetosphere, what the Earth people call the Van Alien belt. It ends about six hundred miles above Earth. We're orbiting this two hundred miles higher since there's never any orbiting traffic there. The space around the outside of the ship just now is pretty hot. That's why we're silver and have all the ports closed."

"Hey, wait a minute," I said. "You must be suspecting leaks or you wouldn't be in hot coveralls. I'm totally unprotected! Are you trying to sterilize me?"

"Thanks for calling it to my attention," said Heller. He picked up the cat and went to the chief mate's room and when he came back, the cat was wearing a scarlet blanket.

"You're absolutely heartless!" I snarled.

"I didn't know you cared," said Heller. But he unchained me from the pipe and took me to one of the engineer's cabins and let me go to the toilet. He fed me some standard emergency rations, throwing them down on the table like he might have for a dog. It emphasized more than anything else that my life was very much at risk: He might take it into his head any minute to simply cut my throat.

He gave me a disposable radiation coverall. I put it on even though I suspected he had cut holes in it or rubbed the insulation off.

He took me back to the flight deck and chained me to the pipes once more. I crouched there, trying to figure some way out of this.

He began to have conversations with Corky about orbital direction and velocity and after quite a while the big Will-be Was main engines went off and the planetary auxiliaries began to drum.

More conversations with Corky and then suddenly the auxiliaries went off. The silence was eerie.

Heller clicked every viewscreen live. There was Earth, looking awfully big. We were right above a red-brown area. But the views appeared a little strange, sort of wavy.

He checked coordinates, and by consulting a map that appeared on one screen, he located Los Angeles and then Las Vegas and then finally Barstow. His finger travelled east to a desert area marked Devil's Playground. He turned to another screen and with a pass of his hand enlarged the view directly below. What a desolate desert it was! All rocks and sand. Unlike so many other places, there was no cloud cover here. He passed his hand again and the image jumped larger. A cluster of what seemed to be newly constructed buildings. Directly in the center of the screen was a large black area. He then got to work. Reading the screens, he cast the safety lines off the umbrella he had built. Like threading a needle, he passed a tension beam through the cage that was just below the mantle. Then he began to work compression beams and tension beams and the whole rig moved around to the back of the ship.

He pushed it further and further astern, enlarging its image bit by bit.

Suddenly the whole thing shivered. It made a sudden movement. The concentric, in-pointing bars of the cage all went into place.

"Got it," he said with a sigh of relief.

"Got what?" I said. I couldn't see anything.

"Got the black hole in the middle of the cage without losing the whole rig. All right, now let's see if it also works as a motor." He picked up a control plate and began to touch buttons on it. Small jets seemed to come from the center out through one or another of the rods.

"That's fine," he said. "Its position can be adjusted."

"With what?" I said.

"There's an automatic sensor for these coordinates. It's in the lowest ring of weights. Excess energy from the hole can be poured through the rods and made to move the whole rig very slowly up or down or back and forth. It's got to stay in position for the next few million years, orbiting right above this spot in the Devil's Playground."

"What is this thing?"

"A concentrating mirror. Energy from the black hole inside the cage is reflected down, passed through the converter ring and hot-spotted on that pile on the Earth's surface. The lowest ring of weights uses Earth gravity to keep it upright. There is a sensor for coordinates in the weight ring that adjusts position." He watched it for a bit. "Good. We're through here."

He threw a bunch of switches that turned off all beams. "Corky, take us out of this and into normal time, five hundred miles above surface."

"You're going to leave that there?" I said. "Somebody might run into it!"

"Nobody's travelling thirteen minutes in the future," he said. "Not on this planet. They won't even see it in a telescope. And if any probe blunders into it, didn't you see the sign on it?" He was pointing at a screen.

There was a sign! It was all around the mantle. It was in English and it said:

POWER FOR PEOPLE, INC. No Trespassing

Hands Off HIGH VOLTAGE

We experienced the sudden flash and grind of a shift back into normal space. I always hated it.

The viewscreens looked more normal. The Pacific Ocean spread vastly below. It seemed, from the shadow west of Hawaii, that it must be morning in Los Angeles.

Heller was busy with the viewer-phone. Izzy's face appeared.

"Oh, thank heavens, Mr. Jet. We were getting so worried. I hope nothing serious caused the delay."

"I just ran into something," said Heller, "but pushed it out of the way. Is the chief engineer of Power for People there?"

"Dr. Phil A. Mentor is right in the anteroom. He's been sleeping there! I'm so glad you are all right, Mr. Jet. I will get him at once."

Shortly, a Vandyke-bearded man was on the screen. I suddenly recognized him from the Countess Krak's classes.

"Is your ferromagnetic pile in place?" said Heller.

"Yes, Mr. Jet. Exactly according to your design."

"It should be hot now," said Heller.

Dr. Mentor was reaching for a phone. It evidently was a lease line as he didn't make any call. An excited voice was coming through the earpiece and spilling into the viewer-phone. "Devil's Playground Observation Post One."

"Is your pile hot?" said Mentor.

"Jesus Christ, yes, chief. Hot or something. The whole God (bleeped) thing just disappeared right on schedule. Somebody left a truck in there and it vanished, too!"

"Very good," said Mentor. "Are the time step-down capacitors functioning?"

"I'll check. We got so excited when the pile vanished–"

"Check those capacitors," said Mentor.

After a moment, the excited voice came back. "Yes, sir. There's a stream of microwave power pouring out! They've got it beamed into the sky at the moment."

Mentor looked into the screen. "Anything else you want to know, sir?"

"No, that's fine. Let Izzy in there."

Izzy moved in front of the screen. "I'm so glad it's working. Congratulations, Mr. Jet."