"What's this all about, sir?" Roger finally asked.
"I'm not at liberty to tell you, Manning," replied Connel. "Though I want to thank you for your quick thinking. How did you happen to discover the bomb?"
"I was sighting on Regulus for a position check and Regulus was dead astern, so when I swung the periscope scanner around, I spotted that thing stuck to the fin. I didn't bother to think about it, I just yelled."
"Glad you did," nodded Connel and turned to stare at the Polaris again. "Now I'm afraid we'll just have to wait until that bomb goes off."
"Isn't there anything we can do?" asked Tom.
"Not a blasted thing," replied Connel grimly. "Thank the universe we shut off all power. If that baby had blown while the reactant was feeding into the firing chambers, we'd have wound up a big splash of nothing."
"This way," commented Astro sourly, "it'll just blast a hole in the side of the ship."
"We might be able to repair that," said Tom hopefully.
"There she goes!" shouted Roger.