His brain felt clear. He knew the computer would now accept him and restore his certificate. He toyed briefly with the idea of somehow ducking out and getting back to the Space Service office, but he turned that notion down. He wanted to do this up in style.
"We'll take you to the ship," Das Shamra said. "The plan is to lie in wait off Phobos until the dionate ship shows up. Then you can follow our instructions."
"You're the boss," Kendall said. "Until this caper is over, anyway. Then I'm heading back to Earth and you can all rot so far as I care."
They took him far out of town, circled around the outlying districts until he was pretty thoroughly confused, then brought him back. By now it was night, and the twin moons were in the sky—tiny Phobos, only ten miles in diameter, and Deimos, half her size.
The ship was a small, sleek job, some twenty years old. Where they got it didn't seem evident; possibly they had blackmailed some other pilot into surrendering it, possibly they had hijacked it in some fashion or other.
He climbed aboard, followed by Das Shamra and his five henchmen.
"You'll have to weigh yourselves," he announced. "With all six of you on board I'll have some tricky mass-calculations to do."
It took him a few hours to calculate the orbit, another hour to run a routine check on the ship. It was in beautiful shape, ready to go.
"Strap down for blastoff," he said, when he was satisfied.
The Martians frowned in bewilderment. "We've never been in space," one of them said. "We don't know how to get into the acceleration cradles."