"Take it easy, will you, Quent?" said Ross. "I want to have some fun." He turned to Manning. "Untie Corbett and get on the other side of the deck. Have yourselves a nice long talk before you take your last walk."
Roger slowly bent over to untie Tom, muttering a space oath under his breath. The two brothers retired to the opposite side of the control deck and sat down. Ross kept his paralo-ray pistol in his hand and never once took his eyes off the two cadets.
"Well, what happened?" demanded Quent. "What are you doing here with Corbett and where in the blazes is Charley?"
"Charley is back on Titan, and probably dead," replied Ross easily. "He wouldn't pay any attention to us when we suggested plugging up the old tunnels when we started mining that uranium, so the oxygen which we were sucking off from the main screen supply took too much. The screens started to go. Practically the whole city is flooded with ammonia gas and it's being abandoned."
Roger and Tom stood quietly, listening, and when Roger heard the news he turned to Tom with a questioning look on his face. Tom merely nodded grimly.
"But what are you doing here with this load of pitchblende?" Quent persisted.
"Everything would have been all right, even with the screens letting go," explained Ross, "if it hadn't been for Corbett and that big jerk Astro. They followed me out to the warehouse and down into the mine. Good thing we caught them, or we'd be on our way to a prison asteroid right now."
Quent glared over at Tom. "And Charley spilled the beans about the whole thing, eh?"
"Not exactly, but the Solar Guard knows enough to be suspicious," replied Ross. "We had some trouble with the radiation-detection gear and wanted to haul it out to the hide-out for Manning to check. We decided to bring out as much of the stuff as we had mined, and when we caught Corbett and Astro snooping around, we made them load the ship. Corbett, here, got smart and Astro escaped. In the fight, Charley fell out of the ship. I don't know if he got away or not."
"Do we have a whole shipload of the stuff?" asked Quent.