From their coign of vantage the two patrolmen saw their gallant ship's terrific end, saw the one pirate vessel suffer collision with the flying fragment, saw the other escape inertialess, saw her disappear.
The inert pirate vessel had now almost exactly the same velocity as the lifeboat, both in speed and in direction; only very slowly were the large craft and the small approaching each other. Kinnison stood rigid, staring into his plate, his nervous hands grasping the switches whose closing, at the first sign of detection, would render them inertialess and would pour full blast into their driving projectors. But minute after minute passed and nothing happened.
"Why don't they do something?" he burst out, finally. "They know we're here. There isn't a detector made that could be badly enough out of order to miss us at this distance. Why, they can see us from there, with no detectors at all!"
"Asleep, unconscious, or dead," VanBuskirk diagnosed. "And they certainly are not asleep. And believe me, Kim, that ship was nudged. It's quite possible that she was hit hard enough to lay out most of her crew cold—anyway enough of them to put her out of control. And say, it's a practical certainty that she has a standard emergency inlet port. How about it, huh?"
Kinnison's mind leaped eagerly at the daring suggestion of his subordinate, but he did not reply at once. Their first, their only duty, concerned the safety of two spools of tape. But if the lifeboat lay there inert until the pirates regained control of their craft, detection and capture were certain. The same fate was as certain should they attempt flight with all near-by space so full of enemy fliers. Therefore, hare-brained though it appeared at first glance, VanBuskirk's wild idea was actually the safest course!
"All right, Bus, we'll try it. We'll take a chance on going free and using a tenth of a dyne of drive for a hundredth of a second. Get into the lock with your magnets."
The lifeboat flashed against the pirate's armored side and the sergeant, by deftly manipulating his two small hand magnets, worked it rapidly along the steel plating toward the driving jets. There, in the conventional location just forward of the main driving projectors, was indeed the emergency inlet port, with its galactic-standard controls.
