Finally he gave up hoping to establish his whereabouts by visual inspection, and took his first look at the control room. He could see nothing changed at first; then he found a small auxiliary panel beside the pilot's seat, which contained a bar-topped toggle switch and three pilot lamps quite different in appearance from the rest of the Lancaster's standard equipment. He felt an urge to try the toggle, but fought it down; it was too much like playing with toy building blocks made of subcritical masses of plutonium, and Farradyne wanted to stay alive long enough to watch the ruin of the enemy, not become a part of it.
He got his 20-power binoculars from the locker and went down to the spacelock. The near-by starship was as abandoned as the Lancaster, except for that one bright porthole. Through it he could see nothing but one corner of wall and ceiling.
A sudden flash of light made Farradyne drop to the floor of the salon and wriggle forward cautiously to the edge of the door.
A vehicle of some sort had turned in at the spaceport from the rim, and its headlights had flashed against his face. He looked at it through the glasses but could not see beyond the glare of the headlights; the car was coming swiftly toward the Lancaster.
Farradyne gathered himself to make a grand rush for his cubby, but stayed to watch because he could make safety after he was certain that the car would stop at the Lancaster. Instead, the vehicle swung around the interstellar ship and stopped by the landing ramp. Three men and a woman got out—
"Norma!" breathed Farradyne.
High in the enemy ship, one porthole winked off and the one beside it winked on, and a few minutes later Farradyne saw the same trio of men escort Clevis from the landing ramp and hand him into the spaceport jeep. The engine roared and they took off for the rim of the port.
Farradyne looked around the spaceport and wondered. It seemed such a cozy place, completely unguarded so far as he could tell. This undoubtedly meant that the port was a restricted zone and anybody permitted inside the boundaries was known and recognized before he got in.
The jeep disappeared, and Farradyne came down his landing ramp and scooted across the flat spaceport to the starship.