"What I was saying," laughed McBride, "was the effect that rates of change of acceleration have upon the anatomy."
"As I demonstrated," grinned Hammond from the floor, "it is changes in acceleration that cause havoc. It causes jerks—"
"To sit on the floor," chuckled McBride. "Get up. Stop playing on the floor, Steve, and take a squint at this curve. Plotting an exponential factor for the ordinates of the graph, using Telfu for the center, we find a locus of equal power-soak-up out here—which I estimate to be a little more than two hundred thousand miles!"
"Ah, the wonders of analyst," said Hammond. "With a defunct drive and a wild idea, Jawn McBride hauls a satellite out of the sky and plants it—Here!"
"What do you think?"
"Who am I to argue with people who understand the mysteries of A to the Xth power equals zero, divided by the date of the month times the ace of spades, equals eleven o'clock. All joking aside, Mac, it looks right to my uninitiated mind."
"Does, hey?"
"Sure. That means that said moonlet—I say moonlet because our pix show that Telfu hasn't anything worthy of the name of a full, honest moon—must be high in cupralum."
"Sort of hard to believe."
"Yeah, but not impossible. It's quite believable that the right alloys should be found au naturel, so to speak. There's nothing tricky about cupralum. Mix it together and smelt it down—voila!—cupralum. A totally useless and good-for-nothing alloy prior to the discovery of the gravitic spectrum."