"Ye-ah!" he growled to himself. "After I phoned to lease a rocket. She must have known, but how?"
Someone in the shipping office? Well, why not Peters, the pilot? And then Braigh had come along, pretending to have been on his way back to Centauri VI and hoping to buy a fast passage on a small vessel for business reasons. He had been free and ready with his money, leading Tremont to consider cutting his own expenses on the charter.
It seemed, on the face of it, that the three of them had never met until the Annabel lifted.
"But they had, all right!" Tremont told himself. "That was no chance, anywhere along the line. I've been very neatly highjacked!"
The girl must have trailed him to make sure they picked up the right man. Braigh had never explained exactly what he was doing on the satellite; he could have arranged for the assignment of the rocket, or perhaps of the pilot, when Tremont called. Then they had gathered around to hitch rides, and had been in control ever since.
Tremont looked at the slowly progressing constellations and cursed himself. He began to have the feeling that there would be no way out of this. They would regret pitching him into space in such an offhand manner, he reminded himself, when they opened his case. It would be too late as far as he was concerned.
Come to think of it, he considered, that Braigh looks pretty smart, under that idiot-kid pose. He might just break my code, given time. And the parts made up of model photos or drawings he can sell almost as is.
When he came to think of it, Tremont was surprised that no one had tried the same racket before. He had laid out a fortune for what the three thieves were stealing from him.
He drew in his left arm again and raised the wrist to the neck of his helmet. By looking down his nose, he discovered to his surprise that he had been out nearly an hour. He had wasted more time than he thought in reviewing his earlier encounters with Dorothy aboard the starship and the others at the spaceport.
He raised the water tube to his mouth and sucked in a mouthful. The taste was stale.