The commander did so, wild thoughts racing through his mind. If a mauler got close enough to him to use magnets, he was done. Cutting arcs would burn through his armor like cheese, and he had no fighting men left. And even if he had—even a full crew of the most savage fighters known would have to be inescapably cornered before they would mix it with what that mauler had aboard. He would have to go back to base, anyway——
"Tally ho, old fruit!" The pilot slammed his levers over to maximum blast. "It's a mauler and we've been bloody well jobbed. Back to base?"
"Yes." And the discomfited captain energized his communicator, to report to his immediate superior the humiliating outcome of the supposedly carefully planned coup.
XVI.
As the pirate fled into space Kinnison followed, matching his quarry in course and speed. He then cut in the automatic controller on his drive, the automatic recorder on his plate, and began to tune in his beam tracer; only to be brought up short by the realization that the spy ray's point would not stay in the pirate's control room without constant attention and manual adjustment. He had known that, too. Even the most precise of automatic controllers, driven by the most carefully stabilized electronic currents, are prone to slip twenty feet or so at even such close range as ten million miles, especially in the bumpy ether near solar systems, and there was nothing to correct the slip. He had not thought of that before; the pilot always made those minor corrections as a matter of course.
But now he was torn between two desires. He wanted to listen to the conversation that would ensue as soon as the pirate captain got into communication with his superior officers; and, especially should Helmuth put in his beam, he very much wanted to trace it and thus secure another line on the headquarters he was so anxious to locate. He now feared that he could not do both—a fear that soon was to prove well-grounded—and wished fervently that for a few minutes he could be two men—or at least a Velantian; they had eyes and hands and separate brain compartments enough so that they could do half a dozen things at once and do each one well. He could not; but he could try. Maybe he should have brought one of the boys along, at that. No, that would wreck everything, later on; he would have to do the best he could.
Communication was established and the pirate captain began to make his report. By using one hand on the ray and the other on the tracer, Kinnison managed to get a partial line and to record scraps of the conversation. He missed, however, the essential part of the entire episode, that part in which the base commander turned the unsuccessful captain over to Helmuth himself. Therefore, Kinnison was surprised indeed at the disappearance of the beam he was so laboriously tracing, and to hear Helmuth conclude his castigation of the unlucky captain with:
"—not entirely your fault. We will not punish you at all severely this time. Report to our base on Aldebaran I. Turn your vessel over to base commander there and do anything he tells you to do for thirty of the days of that planet."
Frantically, Kinnison drew back his tracer and searched for Helmuth's beam; but before he could synchronize with it the message of the pirates' high chief was finished and his beam was gone. The Lensman sat back in thought.