I looked hard at my three execs.
"Kolomar gave me twenty-four hours," I said. "Whatever we do, we've got to do it without spilling the beans around ears that aren't supposed to hear. You know how scuttlebut races through a crew. Kolomar on one side of us—" I saw Knight wince, "—and the Comrades on the other. Mr. X in between."
"If we put the arm on McGinty," Knight said in that soft voice of his, his beefy face unnaturally white, "Kolomar won't give him a chance. Be sending an innocent man into God-knows-what just to stall for our own skins. And when Kolomar found out it wasn't McGinty, he'd keep right on going, right on to the end of Space itself."
Whatever Knight might've said next never got out. The top-urgent signal on my video panel blinked like crazy. If they'd got through my sergeant and the orders I'd given him, they must want me for real, so I answered.
It was Control. The face on the video belonged to the captain in charge. The voice on the audio echoed the all-hell look on the face.
The voice said one of our Moon-orbit rigs—an L-8, incapable of course of a landing but rigged up out of thin aluminum structural beams with a couple of small rocket motors, fuel tanks, and personal space for strictly observational work—had just blasted clear of our own orbit and was headed Moonwards.
"So what the hell, captain—"
"McGinty's flying it, sir," the voice said. "Unscheduled. All by himself."
My three execs just sat where they were for maybe a full second, mute, their faces immobilized into unintelligent expressions. It seemed that it took me an hour to snap out of it, yet I was moving before they were ... toward my Earth-communications panel.