"None of you thought to look at the Martian spacesuit when we'd removed it?" asked Pink. The others shook their heads. They were all in his quarters again.
"Neither did you, Captain," said Joe Silver. "You were as busy looking at the Martian as we were."
"True enough," admitted Pinkham. "Well, the thing to do first is radio the Diogenes and the Cottabus to stand by for trouble." He lit a cigarette. "If the radio hasn't been tampered with," he said. "Silver, go tell Sparks to start sending to them. Diogenes is down by Planet Five, and Cottabus heading for Four. Tell them to look for us somewhere in the planetoid orbit. They'll have to come in on the radio beam. I don't suppose we can expect them for a day." Joe Silver gave Circe's arm an encouraging squeeze—they'd got on together pretty damn fast—and started out. "And instruct them not to pick up anybody, off asteroids or planets or out of the ether. I don't care if they see their grandmothers floating outside a spaceport."
The thought of his armada joining him made Pink feel more at ease. No sense to that, of course, but three ships are better than one, if only for moral support. "Daley," he said then, "lower the Mutiny Gates."
"You think it's wise?"
"If I didn't, I wouldn't do it," he snapped. It would be the first time that a mutiny gate had been used in more than forty years. All the large ships were equipped with them, great plastikoid barriers which operated from the captain's room, sealing off the officer's sector from the rest of the ship. They had been made standard equipment in the old days, before screenings became really effective and the danger of psychopathic trouble in the crew grew negligible. Now they were of theoretical use in case of boarding by alien life, or of damage to a large segment of the hull ... but they had never actually been brought into play in Pinkham's lifetime. "Drop 'em," he repeated.
Daley pulled open a drawer, tugged at an unused switch, which creaked protestingly; then the brief alarm clang that heralded the fall of the forty gates sounded in the distance. "If he's beyond the gates," the senior lieutenant said heavily, "the crew may be done for."
"No more than if the gates were up," Pink told him impatiently.
"You're projecting," said Daley. "How do we know the nature of the beast? He may mop 'em up in a fit of pique at being shut out there."
"The chances are he's on our side of the walls," said Bill Calico. "Nothing out there of much importance to him. The hydroponics farm, history room, library, and so on."