"This is Cragin on CB-42-SMBB. Check please and know me by this."
"Clear CB we know you."
"Is that custom job registered under Griffin still in your park?"
"Registered all right and primed to the forejets for a big ride if you ask me. Orders?"
"Whack up her radar, but not with an axe. And warm me up an SP-15 if you've got one, with a ten comp bank. Soup the drive and gun circuits. Want a duplicate of her flight plan. That's all and beam me when she blasts."
"When she blasts."
Then it was just a matter of sweating her out. Once Lin Griffin took her trim craft into Space it would be routine, if her bosses, if she were actually heading for any, didn't risk a track beam on her. If they did and picked him up at the same time, they'd need faster guns than he had.
The SP-15 looked brand new, and Cragin had little more than buttoned her up when flight control beamed him. He kept the Griffin ship tracked for a full minute, let it cut the edge of the Mars ecliptic before he cut in his own drive. She was giving Pluto her starboard when he decided on a comfortable watch dog position, and she was headed for the nearest Barrier co-ordinate within an hour afterward. Just as though, Cragin thought, somebody had written the whole script out for both of them, and all they had to do was say their lines and pretty soon the whole thing would be over.
He checked the gun circuits, tried the detectors for a track, jacked in the comptometer bank. One began to hum a little and it took him off guard; he hadn't expected it this soon. She had picked up speed and was going like hell even for a Barrier-bust. But he was certain she hadn't spotted him, and he was flying in her blind spot to keep out of her electroscopes. Sooner or later she'd check in her radar proximity beams and when they didn't work—If she were as smart as she looked she'd be swinging her electroscope lenses all over the sky.
Her Starwasp took the Barrier-bust as though it were just so much Space between Earth and Moon, and Cragin straightened a little in his cushioned acceleration seat. He threw a track of his own on her, got an echo measure on it and entered it as a constant into the comp bank, knocking out the variable that had represented his own control-error margin. It was the only way he'd be sure to keep her. But if she made a mistake or her own comps broke down, they'd both fall off the tight rope.