The long, low metal building was dark and silent. Thorn listened outside a back door, then pushed stealthily inside. The dull red ray of his pocket fluoric flash-lamp lighted him through store-rooms and a kitchen. The place was deserted.
He found Lana's bedroom quickly. It was a bare chamber with a chromaloy cot and chest, and a rack of atom-pistols on the wall. There was a closet, to which Thorn went first. In it hung a dozen suits of the mannish silk jackets and trousers the pirate girl always wore. But in the back of the closet, Thorn found a single gaily-flowered flowing tunic-dress of the type worn by Earth women to social functions.
A queer wave of tenderness swept him as he touched the gay, flowered dress. It was obviously unworn. He could picture Lana taking it secretly from pirate loot, trying it on—
"Hell, am I going soft on the girl?” John Thorn muttered to himself. “I'm wasting time!"
He searched through the big chest. In it he found a flat viridiurn box that was packed with papers.
Thorn's pulses raced as he hastily started scanning the papers by his little ray of dull red light. The first he unfolded was a parchment document, discolored with age. It was a captain's commission in the Earth Navy, dated over forty years before, made out to Martin Cain. Across it was stamped “CANCELLED."
Most of the other papers were old letters of Lana's father. They told nothing. Then Thorn muttered an exclamation as he took out of the box a thick log-book, bound in marsh-calf skin, and filled with the square, precise writing of Martin Cain.
Swiftly Thorn riffled the pages until he found the year he was looking for. With taut eagerness he read the entries.
9-27. (Off Pluto.) It looks as though our raid on the Pluto mining bases with a single ship was too daring. We are being hotly pursued by Neptunian cruisers, and can hear the audio-calls of others.
9-28. Fear net is closing in on us. Space alive with audio calls.