"Wait a minute," said Randy Kinkare, the assistant pilot, voice reeking with unbelief. "How could you see through an opaque face plate?"
"It's not opaque," said Joe Silver officiously. "It's translucent from without and transparent from within. I took a look at it this afternoon."
"Space giants," groaned someone. "Oh, Lord!"
"We can't discount it," said Pink, realizing that he was doing just that, but refusing to disbelieve Circe. Illusion? Not a lie, surely? "She wasn't drugged, after all. She was in full control of senses that were merely slowed down."
There was a discomfortable silence.
Intercom, space drive, life-scanner. Maybe other machinery by this time. Sabotage in such a clever way that no one of the highly skilled officers and technicians could discover how it was done, what was wrong. Space giants? Ah, come on, Pink!
Ynohp. Something wrong with him, some flaw in his looks? No, he was Martian in every oversize pore. Some anachronism?
Hey! Anachronism. Pink's mind fished up the dictionary definition. An error in chronology by which events are misplaced in regard to each other....
He had it.
He got to his feet, motioned Jerry and Wash Daley to go with him. They congregated outside the door, as further talk broke out inside his quarters. He said urgently, "Remember what Ynohp said about his cataleptic state? 'Moth and rust do not corrupt.' He said it as if it were a quotation."