"All right, Hen, now we'll try out your roulette-wheel director by chance," Kinnison said, then went on, in answer to Thorndyke's questioning glance. "A bouncing ball on an oscillating table. Every time the ball caroms off a pin it shifts the course through a fairly large, but entirely unpredictable angle. Pure chance—we thought it might cross them up a little."
Hair-line beams were connected from panels to pins, and soon four interested spectators looked on while, with no human guidance, the Brittania lurched and leaped even more erratically than she had done under Henderson's direction. Now, however, the ever-changing vectors of her course were as unexpected and surprising to her passengers as to any possible external observer.
One more lifeboat left the enforcement vessel, and only the Lensman and his giant aide remained. While they were waiting the required few minutes before their own departure, Kinnison spoke.
"Bus, there's one more thing we ought to do, and I've just figured out how to do it. We don't want this ship to fall into the pirates' hands intact, as there's a lot of stuff in her that would probably be as new to them as it was to us. They know that we got the best of that ship of theirs, but they don't know what we did or how we did it. On the other hand, we want her to drive on as long as possible after we leave her. The farther away from us she gets, the better our chance of making our get-away.
"We should have something that will touch off those duodec torpedoes we have left—all seven of them at once—at the first touch of a spy beam; both to keep them from studying her and to do a little damage if possible. They'll go inert and pull her up close as soon as they get a tracer on her. Of course, we can't do it by stopping the spy ray altogether, with a spy screen, but I think I can establish an R7TX7M field outside our regular screens that will interfere with a TX7 just enough—say one tenth of one per cent—to actuate a relay in the field-supporting beam."
"One tenth of one per cent of one milliwatt is one microwatt, isn't it? Not much power, I'd say, but that's a little out of my line. You can do it, and do it before we run out of time, or you wouldn't have suggested it. Go ahead. I'll observe while you're busy."
Thus it came about that, a few minutes later, the immense sky rover of the Galactic Patrol darted along entirely untenanted. And it was her nonhuman helmsman, operating solely by chance, that prolonged the chase far more than even the most optimistic member of her crew could have hoped. For the pilots of the pirate pursuers were intelligent, and assumed that their quarry also was directed by intelligence. Therefore, they aimed their vessels for points toward which the Brittania should logically go; only and maddeningly to watch her go somewhere else.
Senselessly, she hurled herself directly toward enormous suns, once grazing one so nearly that the harrying pirates gasped at the foolhardiness of such exposure to lethal radiation. For no reason at all she shot straight backward, almost into a cluster of pirate craft, only to dash off on another unexpected tangent before the startled outlaws could lay a beam against her.
But finally she did it once too often. Flying between two vessels, she held her line the merest fraction of a second too long. Two tractors lashed out and the three vessels flashed together, zone to zone to zone. Then, instantly, the two pirate ships became inert, to anchor in space their wildly fleeing prey. Then spy beams licked out, to explore the Brittania's interior.