That was the story.
Then he got to fooling with the burned-out ruins of the Hustic and made a sheaf of graphs, all in five and six colors. They were too complex for Bill or me.
A few days out from Earth, a worried Bill got me up in the middle of my off-shift and motioned to the forward view-plate. There, coming toward us from the inviting blue-green ball of Earth, were thirty closely grouped orange specks. Spaceship driver flares.
Mike took a look too, then held both hands to his forehead with index fingers protruding and wiggled them at us. When I got the idea I wasn't happy about it. The wiggling fingers meant antennae. Martians.
Bill and I gnawed our fingernails. The poor Banshee could neither run nor fight. But the Martian ships went right on by without even trying to contact us on the Luminophone. Mike just grinned through it all.
We landed rough, on account of the burned-out driver, but when things stopped bouncing we were all in condition to limp away.
Mike saw the car pull up outside and had the hatch open before we could stop him.
Polly met him with open arms and a kiss that would have been censored on any telaudio show. She wasn't the pale, subdued, inertia-ridden girl of a few months before. Not at all.
The Professor was dancing up and down with excitement behind her, trying to shake one of Mike's hands.