"How about Drake?" asked McBride.
"We're still the first men," returned Hammond.
"Wouldn't Drake howl to hear you say that," laughed McBride. "She's been suffering under the fact that every time she did anything new, she had to qualify it by saying: 'The first woman—' Well, she's got something this time."
"Think it'll satisfy her?"
"Not until someone proves definitely that Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, William Shakespeare, George Washington, Richard the First, Julius Caesar, and Jack Frost were all women."
"Well, let's get the hemis working. We'll never know whether Sirius has planets until we do. I'd hate to sit in the Queen and go through all the growing pains of looking for planets by observation."
"Yeah, that would take years. What's our velocity, Larry?"
Timkins looked at the velocimeter; squinted through the instrument quickly, adjusting the thumb-screw; and then said: "Thirty-four thousand and dropping at one hundred feet per second, per second, per second."
"We can get good pix of anything close enough to the primary to support life—also big enough, too—in about thirty minutes exposure," said Hammond. "We'll take two shots in each direction, since I've got six hemispherical cameras. That'll give us complete overlapping coverage and double protection against dust streaks. Let's go. Also cut the drive by half."
For thirty minutes the ship plunged on through the Sirian system at the double deceleration. Then for fifteen minutes, the entire personnel was in the darkroom, waiting for the first glimmer of the plates. And at the time that the plates were finished, the velocity of the Haywire Queen had dropped from thirty thousand-odd miles per second to velocities normally used in mere interplanetary travel.