They went to work on the problem. When Fuller and Wade showed up, they were given work to do—Morey gave them equations to solve without telling them to what the figures applied.
Finally Arcot said: "Their period about the common center of gravity is thirty-nine hours, as I figure it."
Morey nodded. "Check. And that gives us a distance of two million miles apart."
"Just what are you two up to?" asked Fuller. "What good is another star? The one we're interested in is this freak underneath us."
"No," Arcot corrected, "we're interested in getting away from the one beneath us, which is an entirely different matter. If we were midway between this star and that one, the gravitational effects of the two would be cancelled out, since we would be pulled as hard in one direction as the other. Then we'd be free of both pulls and could escape!
"If we could get into that neutral area long enough to turn on our space strain drive, we could get away between them fast. Of course, a lot of our energy would be eaten up, but we'd get away.
"That's our only hope," Arcot concluded.
"Yes, and what a whale of a hope it is," Wade snorted sarcastically. "How are you going to get out to a point halfway between these two stars when you don't have enough power to lift this ship a few miles?"
"If Mahomet can not go to the mountain," misquoted Arcot, "then the mountain must come to Mahomet."
"What are you going to do?" Wade asked in exasperation. "Beat Joshua? He made the sun stand still, but this is a job of throwing them around!"