III
She called him. He couldn't imagine how he had overlooked it. Perhaps because it was so obviously there! It was an ordinary enough safe, from what they could see of the front of it; and there was a tiny key in its lock.
They looked at it thoughtfully.
"You didn't try to open it, did you?" Channok inquired.
"No," said Peer; "because—"
"That's what I was thinking," Channok admitted.
There had been, they had decided, at least two groups working against each other in the ship. The dead man had been in charge of the antibiotic. Perhaps the woman had been on his side, perhaps not. But the eight other men had acted together and had controlled the ship. What action or threat of theirs had caused the dead man to release his terrible weapon would be hard to discover now. But he had done it, and the eight men had abandoned the Ra-Twelve promptly, leaving the woman locked in her cabin....
It looked pretty much as if she had been the one who had switched the drives to full speed—before jumping out into space. A pretty tough, desperate lot all around, in Channok's opinion. The Ra-Twelve's log offered the information that they had left Dardrea three calendric days earlier, but had been of no further help in identifying crew or passengers. That most of them were professional criminals, however, seemed a pretty safe bet—as Peer had pointed out, in voyageur terms, amateurs didn't play around with taboo-weapons like a bottled lich!
Also, amateurs—Peer and Channok, for example—could have sense enough not to blunder into a booby-trap....