For probably the first time in her life, Joan Janowick stood mute.
“And suppose you do come along,” Vesta continued relentlessly. “With you at his side, in the line of fire, do you suppose. . . .”
“Just a minute—shut up, Vesta!” Cloud ordered, roughly. “Listen, all of you. The Lensman is doing this, not Vesta, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anybody, not even a Lensman, bedevil my Joan this way. So, Joan, wherever we go, you can come along. All I ask is, you’ll keep a little ways back?”
“Of course I will, Storm,” and Joan crept into the shelter of his arm.
“Ha—I thought you’d pop off at about this point,” Nordquist’s thought came chattily into Cloud’s mind. “Good work, my boy; you’ve consolidated your position no end.”
“Well, what do we do now?” Joe Mackay broke the somewhat sticky silence that followed.
“We wait,” Vesta said, calmly. “We wait right here until we receive news.”
They waited; and, as they waited the tension mounted and mounted. Before it became intolerable, however, the news came in, and Cloud, reading Vesta’s mind as the ultra-sonic information was received, relayed it to other Tellurians. The murderer and his four bodyguards were at that moment entering a theater less than one city block away. . . .
“Why, they couldn’t be!” Helen protested. “Nobody could be that stupid . . . or . . . I wonder. . . ?”
“I wonder, too.” This from Joan. “Yes, it would be the supremely clever thing to do; the perfect place to hide for a few hours while the worst of the storm blows over and they can complete their planned getaway. Provided, of course, they’re out-worlders and thus don’t know what we Vegians can do with our wonderful sense of smell. Of course they aren’t a Tellurian and four Aldebaranians any more, are they?”