personalities are so complex that the Machine blew up all over the landscape when it tried to understand them," Kim said. He dragged a chair out from behind the typewriter table and sat down, carefully balancing the ration can.

"It's rather as though we should set our electronic astrogator to work on a problem with three variables in five dimensions, rather than in four," Captain Barnaby explained. "As you told us, the Machine was a mechanical-analogus calculator. It can multiply, divide, add, square and cube, and extract roots. It performs these operations by coding numbers into mechanical relationships."

"Just a big adding machine," Kim commented irreverently.

"And our 'finagle factor' was too much for a mechanical system." Captain Barnaby briefly explained to the colonel how he and Kim had induced Rhinklav'n to add their invented factor to the Machine's setup. "You see, the finagle factor resolved itself into the square root of a negative number. An electronic calculator, like our astrogator, could extract the root of a minus-number: 'imaginary' numbers of this sort are implicit in its circuit. The Martian Machine out there couldn't do this though. Since there is no mechanical analogue for an imaginary number, the Machine tried to extract the square root of our finagle factor in the same manner in which it would attempt to extract the root of a real number."

Kim drained, his ration can neatly and remarked, "The Machine couldn't do what it had to. All the power of the turbine was thrown into the root extracting system, which wouldn't revolve. So the Machine went nuts, pardon me, sir, and blew its top. Wrecked the power source and all sixty-seven stages. With the square root of minus one, we busted up a Machine half a million years old."

"What now?" Colonel Montgomery asked, rhetorically.

Captain Barnaby studied the bottom of his ration can a moment. "Well, sir, Rhinklav'n was more puzzled, than angered. He wanted to judge humans not out of malice, but from a genuine scientific curiosity. He wanted to see how the Machine would act with an alien problem. His Machine is too badly broken-up ever to repair. He'll have to find another method of judging criminals, first of all. Martian society is founded on strict law."

"Just a moment." The colonel got up from his desk and went down the hall to a door marked "Judge Advocate General's Department, EXTS." He returned with a heavy book, bound between khaki-board covers. "We'll give this 

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