Loftus' young, impatient voice snapped me out of my back tracking.
"—couldn't have known, of course," he was saying, answering Haliburton. "Neither McGinty nor anybody else. And that—that sort of narrows things down, doesn't it?" He threw a nervous look at Haliburton and Knight and at me, compressed his lips in a straight little line, and fumbled self-consciously for a cigarette.
"That's just as ridiculous," Haliburton said. "If any one of the four of us was attempting to outwit the other three, the planting of McGinty's talisman would be a little stupid, wouldn't it?"
I tried to stop walking back and forth; I tried to think about McGinty instead of wondering who I was sorest at, Kolomar or the Comrades. Patrick Michael McGinty, maintenance technician third class, as simple and straightforward as they come. He'd play that beat-up accordion for the sixty of us to make us smile and think about home, while he listened to the music by himself and thought his own thoughts.
Either that, on his own time, or good naturedly griping on the job about what slow pokes all scientists were, especially the Comrades, who with all their big muscles still hadn't got a workable Moon-landing ship together. Our side could build one, McGinty would tell you—"Sure, an' it's a bunch o' misers we are, or we'd be a-wadin' the canals o' Mars by now," he'd tell you, and sometimes made you half believe it.
McGinty was just a tech-third, but he was an honest-to-God Spaceman, maybe even more than the rest of us. "The further out y'go, the more th' edge y'got—an' leave all the other dir-rty business behind besides!"
He'd play that accordion of his and just look out a port hole at the stars while he did it. And when he did you could sort of link up that science degree disappointment, that scolding of the scientists for their "slowness," that business about the misers and the canals of Mars, and the watching out the port hole as he played.
A brawny, rough-and-ready spaceman, yes.
A spy and a thief of top-secret documents, no.
No, and good luck piece be damned.