Jeffries was—piracy-prone!
Ultimately he was asked for his resignation, and he gave it. He was through!
He sat in his apartment for days after that. Just sat there, thinking. He had been set to catch a pirate, and the pirate had been uncatchable. Jeffries had even tried the trick of putting himself in the pirate's place, hoping to follow a ship as Black Morgan had, and thus gain some idea of how it could be done. That, too, had failed.
Everywhere was negative evidence. Rated "Inconclusive" by all men who studied evidence as a means of extracting fact. Ex-Lieutenant Jeffries was no scientist: he was a policeman. He worked with hard facts always, and every case had its hidden clues of concrete fact. They all pointed out who the criminal was; seldom did they point conclusively to all possible suspects and point out who the criminal was not, save one. Therefore Jeffries was not experienced in coping with reams of negative evidence.
But he knew that he had nothing but negative evidence upon which to work. So, blunderingly, he went to work on the long, arduous process of elimination.
He wrote down his facts:
Black Morgan's ship was capable of exceeding the speed of light according to data. This was claimed impossible by all who knew about it and studied it.
Black Morgan, unerringly, was able to intercept a spacecraft traveling at twenty-five hundred miles per second.
Black Morgan was capable of coming up at a speed exceeding light, and decelerating to match the velocity of the ship in a matter of milliseconds. This would produce untold decelerative gravities in the ship—no man could hope to live and it was doubtful that any machine could withstand that treatment. At least, any machine of the size of a spaceship.