Then the three of them were up and starting for the door.
"Hold it!" I hollered, and pointed at the miniature Earth-scanner in the bulkhead above my desk. It was only about a quarter the size of the one in Meteorology, but it still gave me a full view of Earth, silently rolling there in its black frame of Space. They caught on. There was still about ten minutes left of the sixty minutes we had over our own part of the world. Ten minutes more, and we would have been on the other half of our two-hour trip around, and unable to contact home for over an hour.
I fumbled the switch open that put me straight through on a tight, direct 3-E band to the Pentagon. I was talking to Kolomar within less than two minutes.
He didn't move a muscle while I told him what had happened. But he made the grimmest picture my Earth-video had ever framed.
"You'll effect pursuit at once, Kenton. Take what armament your maintenance can fabricate. If he is simply attempting escape, he'll find there's not far he can go. Since he is an inexperienced pilot, you should be able to overhaul him with little difficulty. However, the more logical probability is that he's defecting to them. He undoubtedly has the microstats in his possession, and will rendezvous with one of their own orbit craft. It will be your responsibility to destroy him before that rendezvous can be completed."
"But sir, there's no way of being sure—"
"Destroy him."
My protest was completely lost to a cut contact and a dead screen.
I muttered something and began a half-hearted attempt to contact McGinty. Between signals I scrawled a fast note and handed it to Knight. It told him to order an L-8 ready with an extra rocket unit bolted onto its stern someplace. For the extra power, he'd need a set of transition coordinates for a modified orbit, but that would be up to his department.
The note said for Haliburton to take care of having maintenance rig up a couple of hydrazine torpedoes of some kind. Hell, we weren't even allowed pistols up here, and Kolomar had just said "destroy him." More official double-talk. But, sometimes a maintenance crew was good for something a little better than keeping the rust off door knobs. It was a pretty old rule-of-thumb in Space—if you haven't got it, make it.