"Kolomar gave me twenty-four hours," I said. "Whatever we do, we've got
to do it without spilling the beans around ears that aren't supposed to
hear. You know how scuttlebut races through a crew. Kolomar on one side
of us--" I saw Knight wince, "--and the Comrades on the other. Mr. X in
between."
"If we put the arm on McGinty," Knight said in that soft voice of his,
his beefy face unnaturally white, "Kolomar won't give him a chance. Be
sending an innocent man into God-knows-what just to stall for our own
skins. And when Kolomar found out it wasn't McGinty, he'd keep right on
going, right on to the end of Space itself."
Whatever Knight might've said next never got out. The top-urgent signal
on my video panel blinked like crazy. If they'd got through my sergeant
and the orders I'd given him, they must want me for real, so I answered.
It was Control. The face on the video belonged to the captain in
charge. The voice on the audio echoed the all-hell look on the face.
The voice said one of our Moon-orbit rigs--an L-8, incapable of course
of a landing but rigged up out of thin aluminum structural beams with
a couple of small rocket motors, fuel tanks, and personal space for
strictly observational work--had just blasted clear of our own orbit
and was headed Moonwards.
"So what the hell, captain--"
"McGinty's flying it, sir," the voice said. "_Unscheduled. All by
himself._"
* * * * *
My three execs just sat where they were for maybe a full second, mute,
their faces immobilized into unintelligent expressions. It seemed that
it took me an hour to snap out of it, yet I was moving before they
were ... toward my Earth-communications panel.
Then the three of them were up and starting for the door.
"Hold it!" I hollered, and pointed at the miniature Earth-scanner in
the bulkhead above my desk. It was only about a quarter the size of the
one in Meteorology, but it still gave me a full view of Earth, silently
rolling there in its black frame of Space. They caught on. There was
still about ten minutes left of the sixty minutes we had over our own
part of the world. Ten minutes more, and we would have been on the
other half of our two-hour trip around, and unable to contact home for
over an hour.
I fumbled the switch open that put me straight through on a tight,
direct 3-E band to the Pentagon. I was talking to Kolomar within less
than two minutes.
He didn't move a muscle while I told him what had happened. But he made
the grimmest picture my Earth-video had ever framed.
"You'll effect pursuit at once, Kenton. Take what armament your
maintenance can fabricate. If he is simply attempting escape, he'll
find there's not far he can go. Since he is an inexperienced pilot, you
should be able to overhaul him with little difficulty. However, the
more logical probability is that he's defecting to them. He undoubtedly
has the microstats in his possession, and will rendezvous with one of
their own orbit craft. It will be your responsibility to destroy him
before that rendezvous can be completed."
"But sir, there's no way of being sure--"
"Destroy him."
My protest was completely lost to a cut contact and a dead screen.
I muttered something and began a half-hearted attempt to contact
McGinty. Between signals I scrawled a fast note and handed it to
Knight. It told him to order an L-8 ready with an extra rocket unit
bolted onto its stern someplace. For the extra power, he'd need a set
of transition coordinates for a modified orbit, but that would be up to
his department.
The note said for Haliburton to take care of having maintenance rig up
a couple of hydrazine torpedoes of some kind. Hell, we weren't even
allowed pistols up here, and Kolomar had just said "destroy him." More
official double-talk. But, sometimes a maintenance crew was good for
something a little better than keeping the rust off door knobs. It was
a pretty old rule-of-thumb in Space--if you haven't got it, make it.
And right now, the responsibility for those stats was mine. All mine.
I kept Loftus with me, and kept trying to raise McGinty. The chances
were he wouldn't answer, of course. But there was nothing else to do
until Haliburton and Knight buzzed me that they had everything ready.
"Guess you'd better forget it," Loftus said.