"Vanessa, I suppose?"  Titov said when Wilkinson told him of his decision not to make the Time Jump.

Wilkinson admitted this.

"Can't say that I blame her.  Come to that" he added, "I had my troubles last night.  Natalie's determined to come with me, and she's quite convinced that a day's instruction is all she needs to be able to fly the folplane."  He snorted.  "Women!"

"Women!" agreed Wilkinson.

"So, Chris, I'll be vastly obliged if you do your best to get that wench of mine airborne as soon as the contraption's to hand."

"I still think," said Wilkinson stubbornly, "that it's no job for a woman."

"Isn't it?  Oh, perhaps we in Science City are a little less square than you astronautical types.  Of course, you have centuries of tradition to contend with, tradition that's been building up ever since the very first ship was launched.  Women and children first, and all the rest of it."  He laughed.  "Oh, I'm not sneering, Chris.  Tradition's a fine thing.  But there are times when it has to be jettisoned.  Look at it this way.  Suppose something goes wrong with Henshaw's Time Twister... won't it be better if Natalie and I are marooned together on some other Coil of Time than for me to be stuck there, and for her to be stuck here?"

The rocket from Marsala came in then, skidding to a spectacular landing in a great cloud of glittering ice crystals.  Wilkinson and the biologist walked out to it, reached it just as the outer airlock door opened.  The first of the technicians to emerge called, his voice muffled by his respirator, "Hi, Cap!  I Got some parcels for you here!"  Two of his mates dumped the bundles out onto the snow, then passed down from the aircraft a half dozen gas cylinders.

By this time Vanessa and Natalie had joined them.

"When do we start?" asked the red-haired girl.

"Now, if you like," Wilkinson told her.  "Give me a hand to lug all this junk clear of the rocket."

Even in a gravitational field as heavy as Earth's there would have been no real work involved.  The pack containing the folplane itself was fantastically light, and the motor, the power packs and the skis of the undercarriage came in cases and a strapped bundle that could be carried with ease.  The gas bottles were weightier than the other components, but they were small and not hard to handle.

Wilkinson led the way to a smooth stretch of snow where there were no protruding boulders.  He unsnapped the catches on the pack, carefully unfolded the fabric of the collapsed aircraft, and spread it out on the ground.  It looked like a silhouette of an old-fashioned airplane cut by a child out of a sheet of crumpled paper.  He then removed the motor and one of the power packs from their cases, carefully set them down on the patches of reinforced fabric marked for their reception, and snapped the retaining straps into place.  Then, as the others watched in mystification, he placed the cylinders that he would not be using on other reinforced patches - patches that, when the thing was inflated, would become shallow sockets.

"What's the idea, Chris?" asked Titov.

"Ballast," replied Wilkinson.  "We'll be filling this thing with helium, and we don't want it taking off before there's anybody aboard it."

"But why helium?  Why not carbon dioxide, or ordinary compressed air?"