"They could do it easily enough, in just the way they did do it—by banking accumulators onto it in series parallel. As to why, I'll let you do the guessing. With no load on the Bergenholm you've got full inertia, with full load you've got zero inertia—you can't go any farther. It looks just plain dumb to me. But then, I think all pirates are short a few jets somewhere. If they weren't they wouldn't be pirates."
"I don't know whether you're right or not. Hope so, but afraid not. Personally, I don't believe these folks are pirates at all, in the ordinary sense of the word."
"Huh? What are they, then?"
"Piracy implies similarity of culture, I would think," the Lensman said, thoughtfully. "Ordinary pirates are usually renegades, deficient somehow, as you suggested, rebelling against a constituted authority which they themselves have at one time acknowledged and of which they are still afraid. That pattern doesn't fit into this matrix at all, anywhere."
"So what? Now I say 'hooey' right back at you. Anyway, why worry about it?"
"Not worrying about it exactly, but somebody has got to do some thinking about it, or else——"
"I don't like to think; it makes my head ache," interrupted VanBuskirk. "Besides, we're getting away from the Bergenholm."
"You'll get a real headache there"—Kinnison laughed—"because I'll bet a good Tellurian beefsteak that the pirates were trying to set up a negative inertia when they overloaded the Bergenholm; and thinking about that state of matter is enough to make anybody's head ache!"
"I knew that some of the dippier Ph.D.'s in higher mechanics have been speculating about it," Thorndyke offered, "but it can't be done that way, can it?"
"Nor any other way that anybody has tried yet, and if such a thing is possible the results may prove really startling. But you two had better shove off; you're dead from the neck up. The Berg's spinning like a top—as smooth as that much green velvet. You'll find a can of soap in my locker, I think."