He saw again the corpse-like face of the Director. Yes, they had all been wrong in thinking that nothing mattered to Barrow more than the schedules—Schedules! There had been departure schedules among the papers in Tar Norn's ship. Could he have—
With a sudden intake of breath that was almost a gasp, Mart whirled and ran to the communicator. The others looked at him, startled. Mart was yelling at the mike even before he got near enough to it to talk in a normal voice. "Control! Emergency! Get Jupe Freighter One! Tell him not to test his tubes. Not to touch a lever!"
Then he was racing out of the door and across the field to where the big ugly freighter was up on the racks over the blasting pits. He wasn't counting on that message through the communicator.
Out of breath, he hammered on the steel door and yanked at the handle until the pilot opened it from within.
"Hold everything," Mart yelled at him. "Don't try the test blasts!"
Whether Mart was right or wrong, there needn't be any hurry now, but he was already lowering himself into the ash-filled blasting pit under the rocket tubes of the freighter. Carefully, he groped among the ashes from previous blast-offs, ignored the light soft ash that flew up into his face.
A hand touched heavy cloth, and the other found smooth transpariplast, the helmet of a spacesuit. Gently, he lifted the unconscious body of Leah Barrow and handed her up to the men looking down from the rim of the pit.
Ten minutes later, back in the office, Leah was reacting to the antidote Doc Rogers had just administered. A glance at her face had told the medico that the drug had been Venusian tragweed.
Mart was still answering questions. "... Sure, Tar Norn knew that. Every ship in the system makes its trial blasts just half an hour before take-off. It's a fixed convention. Rocket captains do everything according to a rigid schedule. And we were looking for a time-bomb so we'd never think of the blasting pits. But Tar Norn couldn't have rigged a time-bomb. We didn't think of that when we found the timer was gone. He'd just thrown it away—"