Doug straightened his body, but kept his arms locked around his middle, kept the grimace on his face and feigned shortness of breath.
"Of course what, captain?"
A look of comprehension came suddenly to the captain's face. He straightened, stood again at attention. "According to Constitutional Commandments Four, Part 3, Sub-section 12 as amended July 9, 1949, part A: 'All space craft shall be robot-controlled and shall fly predetermined trajectories, save (1) when bearing members of the Science Council and/or their certified representatives, to whom manual operation and navigation at will is singularly permissible, or (2) when insurmountable emergency shall occur. All other craft shall be launched on the predetermined trajectory as hereinbefore stipulated, and shall be compensated to their true course by remote control from Earth for so long as radio impulses between ship and Earth shall be for all practical purposes instantaneous. Beyond this limit, to be hereinafter described as Compensation Limit, whereafter distance shall create a time-lag of communications and corresponding control impulses so as to make further remote control an impracticability the ship shall continue on the trajectory as last corrected under control of its own self-directing, or autorobot, units. These units will be constructed so as to be inaccessible to all passengers, including instrument and communications technicians."
For a moment Doug said nothing, let the captain remain at attention, struggling to regain his breath and composure. The man had thought the feigned sickness was simply a device to get him off guard so that his alertness might be tried with some disguised test of his knowledge of regulations. Of course that was it ... unthinkable that any officer, any rank, should give such an order as he had given for actual execution.
Funny, how the twists saved you when there was no longer any point in being saved. He was trapped here—trapped, and on Venus the trap would tighten and finally close when Tayne found some opening in his guard and plunged through it.
"Well done, captain. As you were. Your qualifications seem quite adequate. See to it that they are continually maintained."
"Yes, sir."
With what nonchalance he could muster, Doug dropped the sickness act as though it had been a trick the captain might have expected, and opened the brief-tube. He would have to memorize every word of its contents, every direction on the plastic sheets it contained. If he wanted to see his own home again—for that matter, if he ever wanted to see Dot again, he would have to run a bluff that would, he mused, even amaze the United States Bureau of Internal Revenue.
And that, he knew, would be damn near impossible.