Wally had been very busy while Guybrush and Elaine talked. When they came down only half an hour later, he'd already assembled everything. He stood in front of his apparatus, just bursting with the urge to explain everything.
"Okay Wally," said Guybrush. "Show us what you've done."
"Thank you," said Wally. "Least important things first. These chocks I've welded on the floor keep the portal stones in place. Very important. Otherwise I'd have to recalibrate the whole device.
"Now, look up. See that blaster in the roof? I've rigged it so that it shoots directly for the centre of mass of the portal stones. Pretty easy to calculate. The firing mechanism is wired up to this red button on the wall, and also one in the cockpit. Now you can't really see this, but I've also programmed the position of the stones and the blaster into our navigation computers. All we have to do is rotate our ship in the right direction, and activate the blaster when we're pointing the right way."
He walked up the stairs. "Follow me." They came to the cockpit. Wally sat down in the copilot seat and brought up a display on the viewscreen. One half showed a wireframe Boss Hog. The other was taken up with what seemed a totally meaningless spatter of white dots, together with two thin red lines and a tiny red circle. Wally nudged the flight stick, and with that faint lurch he always got when Guybrush turned Boss Hog, they slowly rotated in position - Boss Hog's artificial gravity systems could be a little laggy.
The displays on Wally's viewscreen rotated as they did, and Elaine saw a yellow dot swing into view. The red circle closed around it.
"That's Sol," explained Wally. "I highlighted it for you, Governor."
"And the red circle?" asked Elaine.
"Our error bounds," said Wally. "About 1 billion kilometres radius. I can't really make a precise system, and certainly not on this ship."
"I see the Sun's inside the circle. Does that mean we could shoot ourself into it?"
"I guess," said Wally. "That's so unlikely it's not worth worrying about. So, shall we do it?"
"What," started Guybrush, "you mean, right now?"
"Don't see why not." said Wally, one finger hovering above a red button - identical to the one in the storeroom - on the console.
"You know," said Guybrush thoughtfully, "we still don't know how we ended up at Herman's asteroid. Or how we ended up meeting Simon and Marko..." He trailed off.
"Press it," said Elaine.
Wally pressed the button.
Boss Hog vanished.
They were back. Guybrush knew it instantly, just as he'd known that they'd
left. Because the stars were back, that black carpet of sprinkled light
he'd grown to know and love. Everything was familiar again.
"We're back," he said.
Elaine seemed barely able to stand. "I... I think I'm going to cry."
Wally, all business, tapped away on the console. "Okay, we're back, but pretty far out. Somewhere near Neptune, actually. It'll probably take us a few days to get back to civilisation." He suddenly brightened up and danced out of his chair. "It worked! We're back!"
Guybrush checked his watch. "I know this might sound anticlimactic," he said, "but I think it's time we all went to bed. I know I'm exhausted."
"All right, but I get dibs on the shower," said Elaine.