Then, before the pilot could reply, the voice from the silver and red patrol ship dropped into an exaggerated mimicry of the O'Malley brogue—
"And did yez say 'twas a freighter you had there? Sure, I thot at th' very last 'twas a foine big liner from the Orient and Transpolar run, dropped down here from the hoigh livils! All right, Spud; on your way! But don't crowd the bottom of the Twelve Level so close. This is O—sixteen—L; Jimmy Maddux. By—by! I'll report you O.K."
Again Chet looked at the pilot silently before he glanced back at the vanishing ship, already small in the distance. He repeated the Patrol Captain's words:
"You will 'report us O.K.'—yes, Jimmy, you'll do that, and if they want to find us again you can tell them right where to look."
"I'm pushin' her all I can, Mr. Bullard," said Spud. "'Tis all she can do.... And now do ye go into my cabin—there's two berths there—and we'll just turn in and sleep while my relief man takes his turn. But go in before I call him; there's not a soul on the ship besides ourselves knows that you're here."
And, in the cabin a short time later, Pilot O'Malley chuckled as he whispered: "I gave the lad his course. And Mac will follow it, but it'll niver take him near to the part of Rooshia he expects it to. Still, the record's clear as far as he's concerned; I've got it in the log. Mac's a good lad, and I wouldn't have him get into trouble over this."
In the freighter's cabin the chronometer was again approaching the hour of twenty-two; for nearly twenty-four hours the ship had been on her plodding way. And, lacking the A.D.D.—the Automatic Destination Detector—and other refinements of instrumental installations of the passenger ships, Pilot O'Malley had to work out his position for himself.
And where a faster craft would have driven through with scarcely a quiver, the big ship trembled with the buffets and suction of a wintry blast that drove dry snow like sand across the lookout glasses. The twelve thousand level was an unbroken cloud of snow—a gray smother where the red ship's blunt and rusty bow nosed through.