He turned from the port and looked square at me. His youthful face was a strained, white thing, and if I saw a certain innocence in his young eyes, I saw something else, too. He was the strange kid-man combination you get in Space—just a youngster on the one side, and a latter-day wizard on the other. A head full of scientific answers down to the last decimal point—and full of that other stuff that makes a young man a very young man; the kind of stuff we older guys like to wish could be true, but know just can't be.
"Add it up yourself," I said. I was looking over his shoulder and through the port again. There were other hour glasses out there now, further from McGinty than we were still, but not by much. And to our stern was another pin-point of winking red light and flashing whiteness. Kolomar. We were closing on McGinty's L-8 fast now, and I started for the closet where we kept the suits. Loftus grabbed my arm.
"Not the torpedoes if we can help it, kid," I said. "I'm going out when we pull above him. On a line. If I can grab onto any of the framework, maybe I can put his motors out of commission without blowing things apart. If I can, then maybe we can nudge him all the way around, and shove him all the way back if we have to."
Loftus just turned away. He was watching the red-white flash in the blackness that was Kolomar's rig. I knew what he was thinking, and I was glad he thought that way. Maybe, sometime, the youngsters could play things their way, and we'd have that something a "little better" that McGinty had always been hoping for.
And I guess Loftus knew the plan I outlined had less than a thousand-in-one chance of coming through. Even if I managed to break McGinty's fuel lines some way, this "nudging" business I talked about was probably ninety per cent hokum. Even in an orbital state of comparative weightlessness there was still inertia to consider, and any direct contact we made with McGinty's L-8 could cave in our bulging plasti-fabric fuel tanks. That, or split him wide open.
But I'd never be able to sleep again if I didn't try something before Kolomar's torpedoes, and I didn't care what he saw me do.
I was all rigged out, standing by the airlock, about five hundred feet of line in one gauntlet and a reaction tube in the other, when Knight's voice slurred in my helmet receivers.
"Ken—hold it! He's busting the orbit! He's going to—my God. Ken, he's ditching her Moonside!"
I had a time getting over to the port Loftus was crowding. What Knight was saying was true. I made motions, and Loftus started helping me out of my cumbersome Space outfit while I watched.