"Like Captain Hansen's fountain of youth?" his mind asked, and he laughed.
Like a magnified echo to his laugh came the excited clamor of the alarm bells. The signal board in the mess began to pulse redly. Approaching mass! Asteroid, wandering star, spaceship? Knight waited.
The look-out's voice came excitedly over the intercom. "SP ship! SP ship! And her nose is red!"
And her nose is red! Cut rockets or we'll blow you out of the universe. This was no routine SP check—that would have called for a yellow signal at the Space Patrol ship's bow.
It wanted to know what was the matter. Kent could feel its thought fingers searching hurriedly through his mind. And when it didn't find an answer it grew almost frantic in its headlong scrabbling. Kent Knight's mind was chuckling. He couldn't tell the Thing why, because he didn't know himself!
The muted thunder of the rockets to which his mind and ears had accustomed themselves suddenly cut out as Captain Hansen switched off the cycs. Then there was a long moment of almost hurting silence, then the bow rockets began to fire and slow the ship.
The bow rockets ceased too, finally, and the silence came again. But all the while, Kent Knight's Thing was trying to find an answer.
Sammy came plowing into the mess, a sloshing bottle in one hand, his bald head glistening, his big nose twitching.
He said to Kent, "I knew it was too good to be true. I was just sitting in my cubicle looking out and I saw the Moon. I conjectured that perhaps our exile had come to a premature end. But then that damn SP ship showed up."