Norden looked at Pat, who seemed ready to drop. "Better go back for some rest," he suggested. She shook her head, but did agree to lie down while he began re-checking their results to date. Their best efforts had quieted the excitement of the females by no more than ten percent.
He reduced everything he could to a consistent basis, and added other formulae which might apply from the incomplete relationship tables that strove to reconcile the two recognized spectra. Those might also indicate something about any third spectrum. Either his memory was coming back or his reading of the books and articles was beginning to take effect, he was pleased to notice.
Pat worked the computer, which had fortunately suffered only minor damages, and had been repaired. From the computations, they made the indicated experiments, and fed the results into the machine. This time, it gave only seven suggested answers, with a rough weighing of them. The second one called for one of several organic substances soaked in potassium ferrocyanide and grounded.
While they waited for the chemistry shed to handle that with due precautions on the radio-active isotope, they tried the others. One gave a better than fifty percent reduction, which meant that the females were only mildly crazy.
"Don't they ever relax?" Pat wondered, unwrapping one of the sandwiches Miles had ordered sent in to them.
The female sand lizard's libido mattered less than nothing to Norden at the moment. He was staring at the work he had done in relating hints and fragments of information with pure hunches to get new facts, and realizing that he could never have done that, even before the Aliens had tampered with him. Either he was mysteriously more capable, now that he'd managed to overcome a few of the taboos in his mind, or else the loss of so much of his memory had left his thoughts freer to operate.
"We'll call this the Hardwick spectrum," he decided aloud. "The man was a crackpot cultist, but he was a genius, all the same. And with this, we'll pay those damned Aliens back for what they did to him."
"We wouldn't be able to if you hadn't had time to get the males and yourself into oxygen suits before Armsworth exploded," Pat told him. "They're the only males left alive, now that Mars has been scoured by the Aliens."
He swung around in surprise. "I never...."
The phone saved him from finishing. He hadn't had time to get into a space suit immediately. After the blast he had fumbled around searching for one. And he'd arrived outside the lock without ever having felt discomfort from living in a vacuum for five full minutes!