"Two of 'em. Just starting on an intersect with McGinty."
"Can we make it first, do you think?"
"Nip and tuck, skipper. Maybe. It's almost as if it's all a big surprise to 'em. They're still way out in left field, maybe not quite as close as we are."
Knight muttered something over the rasping voice on his H-F. "—ought to get an Academy Award—"
He was right. Their acting and their timing couldn't have been more perfect except that they had had to gamble from the first on getting to McGinty before we did and still make things look all innocence. Maybe we could make them lose that one, anyway. You could be too clever.
But they were armed, and that hedged their gamble pretty convincingly. We had two clumsy jury-rigged torpedoes which might or might not hit whatever they were fired at.
The voice halted, and then it was up to me. I was supposed to be the one to make up the excuses, not Kolomar. I was the one who had to give "an immediate account of the untoward and unadvised action" of my L-8s. And Kolomar would let me sweat it out by myself.
"What'll I tell 'em, Ken?"
"Tell 'em—oh, hell. Tell them one of our crew went Space-psycho, and that we're doing all in our power to recover him and the rig he's flying before any inconvenience can occur which might disturb the planned schedules of our esteemed Comrades of Space. One fairy tale's as good as another."
Loftus reworded the message as nice as pie, and then after a minute the H-F was quiet. For the record, things were fine. Of course, our Comrades were going to "assist" in the recovery of our wayward crewman—