"Maybe this planets Neptune do it."
"How, Johnny? We tested the impervium from every angle, and found it nothing but pure metal."
"Maybe is so. Dam' gods, Neptune, are funny feller. Sometimes he look like friend ... sometimes he are foe. Sometimes just do nothing ... but plenty happen just because Neptune are there. See?"
Tim whistled. "I see what you mean. Like a catalytic agent. You can't detect it. You don't test it ... but it does something."
"Who's the difference? Call her cataltickic agents ... call her fool gods Neptune. What them hells!" The little Greek shrugged his shoulders and was silent.
Up in the Solabor's bow, later, Thurner spun the dials on the automatic calculator. Timmy watched him idly, then, moving away from the window, fell asleep. Johnny Damokles hummed an old tune, and lost himself in reveries on Greece. It was strange that so intense a national feeling could survive the melting pot of world assimilation. Yet the Greek national feeling had survived unchanged for more than three thousand years. The greasy old suit which Johnny Damokles wore, remained almost unchanged from the 20th Century attire which his ancestors had worn at Crete and in the long, bloody fight down through the mountains from Olympus. Alone amongst all the people of the 28th Century, the Greeks remembered their past glory, and the bloody history which had split them as a nation, yet welded the iron of heroism into their souls.
Only the Greeks, in a world of mechanics and science, were still concerned with events now dead and gone. Small nations may live ... in tradition.
Johnny Damokles let his gaze slowly fall from that wild pattern of unvisited universes which spread before him in the Solabor's ports ... and slowly turned the pages of his beloved Aristotle. An essay on the nature of the order of things caught his attention, but reading was no pleasant occupation inside the Solabor's stuffy little cabin. Johnny's head nodded. His eyes fluttered. He fell asleep.