I'm screwy as a jaybird, Web said.
The arrival of Kunklin and Prule was neither coincidental nor particularly fortunate. There is an indescribable something which a spaceship traveling at speeds beyond light does to the fabric of space, warping, shredding, leaving a trail which lasts for many days. Kunklin did not need a great deal of luck to pick it up, as he did, just a short way in from Alpha Centauri. He was equipped with a ship of the Central Repair Command, one of the most diversely powerful mechanisms ever produced by a living mind. Thus Kunklin and Prule arrived with great haste, but with no great luck. They were too late to prevent the deaths of the forty-seven men—for death it was—or the death of Joe Falk.
And so it was that while Web was sitting numbly on a projection of the turret, making a mortal effort to control himself, he became watched, in turn, by two separate sets of alien eyes.
The first set of eyes—which were more or less human in structure, differing only in their purple color—belonged to Kunklin and Prule. They had swept in a wide arc around the crescent-lit limb of the Moon, and halted at a discreet distance to survey the terrain before going in. Telescopes of an impossible resolving power picked out first the station, then the rockets, and eventually Web Hilton. Because they had a knowledge of the aliens, and of the type of crime that the aliens would commit, they knew at a glance what had happened aboard the satellite.
But, at the sight of it, Kunklin was startled.
"A space station!" he cried. "Well I'll be jetted." And not yet having noticed the empty suit of Falk—the arms of which had begun to float out helplessly, like a beggar—Kunklin regarded the doughnut with a delighted interest.
Prule, a square, gloomy man who was always the more sober of the two, grunted darkly.
"They put up a space station right in the midst of being plundered, poor devils. They must have walked right into it."
It was Kunklin's turn to be sombre.