"Right here!" said a voice at my elbow. I turned and looked. He was
only medium-sized, but he had a hard jaw and a hard eye. "What's going
on here?"
"Plenty is going on!" This was Betty. "Pirates took over the expedition
base, and this man gave them a power slug to make their getaway."
"Shut up!" I told her. "Let me tell this so it makes sense."
"Makes sense! Does it make sense to let those thugs off scot-free, with
eighteen hours head start? We'll never catch them!"
"Yes we will. And besides, if I'd let them stay, they would have
blasted this ship out of the sky. And besides that, I had to give them
something to let you loose--"
"Suppose you both shut up," the CO suggested, "and come up to the
bridge and let me have the straight of this."
The three of us went into the control cabin which was unoccupied at the
moment. The CO motioned us to chairs. We peeled off our bulgers and
sat down.
"Now--Miss Day, I believe? I'm Allison, Commander, in charge. Let's
have your version."
* * * * *
Betty gave him the story of all that had happened since I landed on
Vesta, and enough of the background to make the story clear as far
as she knew it. Allison buzzed for the medical officer when she got
to the part about my ribs, and I was untaped and taped again. I was
glad enough by now to have someone else worrying about them for awhile
besides me.
Aside from that he made no comment until Betty had finished. Then he
turned on me, and his eye was harder than ever.
"Well, Denby? I realize that you're not sworn in as a Patrolman, and
I suppose you thought you were acting chivalrously. But it's rather a
tradition that all spacemen consider themselves unofficial deputies of
the Patrol when the occasion arises, and it seems to me that even a
civilian might have kept his mouth shut about that slug. As for their
shooting us out of the sky, we would have something to say about that.
We know how to operate against land batteries."
"I don't doubt that," I assured him. "But I think you'll agree that a
ship in space with no drive is an easier set-up."
"No drive? What do you mean?"
"Just that. Stony and his boys are sitting out in space with a blown
tube waiting for you to come along and pick them up. If you want to
know exactly where, give these figures to your navigator and let him
finish them on the computer. I've got a fix on them for every ten
minutes from blastoff to the time their main drive tube blew four hours
and forty-three minutes later."
"How do you know their tube blew? I never heard of such a thing."
"Brother, I did! And if you don't know how fast a Group IV slug can
chew the guts out of a graphite liner, just ask me. But those lads
didn't know. When they left Earth at the end of the Polar War, Group IV
fissionables weren't heard of, nor tungsil. When I gave them the Group
IV slug that the ground crew gave me by mistake on Phobos, they didn't
know the difference."