debts then, Lieutenant."

Kim raised his right gauntlet, drew a pad of paper and a pencil from a pocket at the back of his hand, and scribbled rapidly. "If we get out of this, Captain, I'll owe about 1046 credits. Subtracting pay due for the last semi-annual period, I owe 437 credits."

"And I have debts totaling 600 credits," Captain Barnaby said thoughtfully. He turned to Rhinklav'n. "The debts of myself and Lieutenant Kim, Sir Honored First Technician of the Machine, total 1037 Western Credits. Being debt, that's a negative number, of course."

"Of course, Captain," Rhinklav'n agreed. "The Machine can handle any sort of number, even a negative number. You noticed that your social value to Mars was easily represented as a minus-number." Rhinklav'n talked rapidly to his assistant and handed him the values of the finagle factor, rewritten in Martian ideographs. He faced Captain Barnaby again. "It will take us about an hour to enter this new factor into the Machine," he said. "You'll not mind waiting?"

"No, not at all," Barnaby murmured. He and Kim leaned against the inside wall of the amphitheater, watching the Martian technicians hurry about; they removed gears and replaced them with gears of another ratio; they connected a stage consisting of eccentric cams strung on shafts; and they installed a mass of machinery at the sixth stage, where the operation of extracting square root was to take place. Kim, comparing the heavy gears and levers of the Machine with the compact tubes of his electronic astrogator, remarked, "It's like using a trip hammer to crack a walnut."

After a few minutes of watching, Kim and Barnaby became conscious of an intruder within their helmets, a most unpleasant odor. They glanced up to the edge of the bowl. The Martian sightseers were sitting up there, dangling their legs above the Machine and utilizing the pause in the proceedings to eat their picnic lunches. They were busily unwrapping bundles of food from the mal-skin pouches hanging by their sides and eating as they watched the technicians work over the Machine.

One of the tourists, judging from his height a young male, threw a small parcel toward Kim. The lieutenant picked it up and unwrapped it. The stench of Martian garlic became unbearable as Kim stared at the unidentifiable tidbit of meat the Martian had thrown him; the air-pump on his shoulder drew the redolence into his helmet in such quantities that Kim's eyes burned. He gestured to show that, while his every instinct demanded that he 

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