eat the delicious morsel, he couldn't take his helmet off to do so. With an elaborate pantomiming of sorrow, Kim pitched the gift back up to the Martian boy.

A few adjustments later the technicians filed up from the Machine pit. Rhinklav'n walked over to the two EXTS officers. "If you gentlemen will accompany me, we'll begin the trial at once."

Kim and Barnaby walked together up the steps that led from the Machine, then turned and looked down at the dozens of stages of complex machinery, into which memory and intelligence of a sort had been built. Rhinklav'n pointed toward the fifth and sixth stages. "It is there that the combined finagle factors of you men will be calculated. The fifth stage is quite simple; it will perform the necessary division and multiplication. The sixth stage will extract the square root of the product derived by the fifth. The next six stages of machinery contain the variables of terrestrial behavior, which I and my colleagues calculated from Earth texts. The other stages on the field, fifty-three of them, will collate the results of the calculations of the first twelve stages with our legal code and determine punishment. The final product will appear at the sixty-seventh stage, represented as the speed of rotation of a single shaft. The revolutions-per-time-interval are decoded by a simple formula to determine the punishment to be levied upon you. Doubtless, it will be some unpleasant form of death."

Kim muttered that he wished that Martians had a bit more tact.

Rhinklav'n waved a hairy arm toward his assistant who had remained below in the Machine pit; and that Martian ran to the power house to start the mercury-turbine engine that ran the Machine. With a whistling that set the thin atmosphere trembling for miles around, the turbine began to turn.

The sightseers on the edge of the amphitheater wrapped up the scraps of their lunches, replaced them in their mal-skin picnic hampers, and stood up to watch the Machine. Kim and Barnaby paced up and down along the edge of the bowl, looking down upon the mechanical cerebration being performed by the huge Machine. With a smooth transfer of power from one stage to the next, the first problem—the probable duration of Klaggchallak's life when it had been interrupted by the jets of the Vulcan—was solved, and the mechanism of the second stage began to revolve.

"They're seeing how long we can be expected to live, now," Captain Barnaby commented.

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