“True enough,” Rock agreed. “We’ll know the answer in a few weeks.”
Kalmus told the boys how he had come into possession of his scrap with the priceless information. He said that his friend in the space salvage business who had rented them the Dog Star had had on hand some of the things from the destroyed Sagittarius. One day he had found the yellowed bits in with some bulkhead parts. He mentioned this to Kalmus, who looked up the old newspaper accounts of the double disaster and prevailed upon his friend to give him the valuable scraps. Then he had made his plans for recovering the Northern Cross.
Rock was elected chief navigator and leader of his group. Kalmus, of course, was already head of his own group.
The Dog Star’s direction known now, Rock sat at the keyboard of the electronic brain and “typed” out the corrected ship’s path. The complicated math problem was solved quickly, and the answer tape was then fed into the automatic pilot. Only minor corrections of the controls for direction would have to be made by hand until the ship reached its destination.
In the space days that followed, the two groups kept pretty much to themselves. Even eating and sleeping were carried on in separate quarters. Since this was a voyage for mutual gain only, all preferred such an arrangement. Kalmus and his friends prepared their meals in the galley at a set time, and the boys took a later meal hour.
One day when the boys were reading and playing quiet games in the lounge to pass the long hours, they heard a commotion from Kalmus’ part of the ship. Rock got up from the game of chess he was playing with Shep and went to the door. Kalmus was approaching briskly down the corridor, his big frame making his hard-soled shoes thump loudly against the floor.
“What’s wrong?” Rock asked him.
“A meteor tore through the ship just a few feet from Mumbly,” Kalmus replied. “Mumbly was so scared when he heard it that he nearly jumped out of his skin! He left the floor and floated clear up to the ceiling! We had to pull him down!”
Rock and some of the other fellows went to investigate.
The room pressure was still up, but Mumbly Pegg, the near-victim, was pale clear up to his disordered shock of red hair. Kalmus’ stoop-shouldered friend kept mumbling how close he had come to being killed, a mannerism that had gained him his nickname. He talked incessantly to himself, neither getting a reply from anyone nor expecting any.