"It might," frowned the skipper. "Be sabotage. He said he'd do everything in his power to prevent our reaching Earth. And he's up and around now."
"If you think that," I suggested, "why don't you shove him in the clink, just to make sure?"
"Can't do it. Because I've no proof he's responsible for these occurrences, and besides, a rescued passenger is entitled to the courtesy of the ship."
So that's how I assumed, in addition to the rest of my duties, the job of watch-dogging the mysterious Paul Moran. As Cap McNeally had said, Moran was up and about now. He had made what Doc Jurnegan claimed was the swiftest recovery in the annals of medicine. He still looked like a skeleton in search of a square meal. But there was sanity in his eyes. If not always in his speech. Like that afternoon in Sparks' radio turret, for instance.
We had been talking, Sparks and I, about space-flight. What a great thing it was. How, only in its infancy, it was already changing man's outlook, widening the borders of man's domain, creating a newer, greater universe.
"We got," Sparks said, "reason to be proud of ourselves. Gee, I was readin' in the library—"
"You," I interrupted wonderingly, "can read?"
"Comets to you, Lootenant!" sniffed Sparks. "As I was sayin' before I was so rudely ruptured, I was readin' in the library some old books from the Twentieth Century. Just about a hundred an' fifty years old, mind you! They had the craziest ideas about what men would find on other planets, if an' when they ever got there. Flame-men, an' robots, an' all sorts of things.
"Nothin' like what we actually found. 'Course, we shouldn't laugh at 'em too much. They had no way of knowin'. We're the first people ever traveled in space."