“Very good. I’m busy now——”
“I’ve a tip for you,” said Joe. “I think it should be checked right away. I don’t feel too good about it.”
The Major waited impatiently. And Joe explained, very carefully, about the fight on the Platform the day before, Braun’s insistence on finishing the fight in Bootstrap, and then the tip he’d given Joe after everything was over. He repeated the message exactly, word for word.
The Major, to do him justice, did not interrupt. He listened with an expression that varied between grimness and weariness. When Joe ended he picked up a telephone. He talked briefly. Joe felt a reluctant sort of approval. Major Holt was not a man one could ever feel very close to, and the work he was in charge of was not likely to make him popular, but he did think straight—and fast. He didn’t think “hot” meant “significant,” either. When he’d hung up the phone he said curtly: “When will your work crew get here?”
“Early—but not yet,” said Joe. “Not for some time yet.”
“Go with the pilot,” said the Major. “You’d recognize what Braun meant as soon as anybody. See what you see.”
Joe stood up.
“You—think the tip is straight?”
“This isn’t the first time,” said Major Holt detachedly, “that a man has been blackmailed into trying sabotage. If he’s got a family somewhere abroad, and they’re threatened with death or torture unless he does such-and-such here, he’s in a bad fix. It’s happened. Of course he can’t tell me! He’s watched. But he sometimes finds an out.”