Bolfass hesitated - his hand was already on his SD gun - but something in the tone of Nettie's voice stilled the fury inside him. He left his gun alone.

'Scraliontis and Brobostigon were on the ship the night before the launch,' said The Journalist. 'They wouldn't have wanted to attract attention by going in and out of it, so I imagine whatever they took out of the central intelligence system, they'll have hidden somewhere on board.'

'Sounds feasible,' said Assmal, the other Yassaccan commander, who up to this point had been doing fantastically well at the Tetris game.

'Very well!' said Bolfass. 'We will search the ship from prow to keel. Those parts must be found or we will never get Nettie back to her own planet. Indeed, we will find it hard enough to limp back to Yassacca as it is!'

'I think we can make it, Captain!' said Rodden, the navigational engineer. 'We are in the Starius Zone E-D 3278 of the Praxima-Betril Section of the Inner Galaxy.

I can get us home by dead reckoning, so long as Assmal can get manual control of the ship's power.'

Assmal nodded. 'I have control now of enough functions to be able to steer. But it will be a long trip - several hours at least.'

And so, the great Starship Titanic turned its vast bulk in the star-bright darkness of space and began its weary journey back to the planet of Yassacca.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

The search for the missing parts of the Starship's brain proved more difficult than anyone could have anticipated. This was mainly owing to the fact that the ship's robots were becoming increasingly eccentric in their behaviour. The Doorbots were beginning to hallucinate - opening the doors for non- existent First Class Passengers' pets and being charming to waste-disposal units. The Liftbots had gone into a permanent decline, convinced that the only way to avoid the end of civilization as they knew it was to eat less protein. The Dustbots kept dashing out from the skirting and depositing on the floor bits of fluff large enough to trip everyone up.