"No," I said, smiling. I reminded him that the war had been over before I was born.
"Hmm-m, yes. Did I ever tell you the time I was fighting near Gossena on Ganymede? I was a foot-soldier, y'know."
He had told us many times and I said so, but he didn't bat an eyelash. "Anyway," he said, "it was a war of nerves. We tried to scare them, and they tried to scare us, one way or another, and the side that did the most scaring won. Us."
Clair wanted to know what all that had to do with this.
"Easy, kid. Just hold your horses. These guys on the other side of 4270 will be using a war of nerves with us, a real simple one. They know it'll be maybe a month before the government ship comes—"
"What about the radio?" I said. "Won't they think we called for help?"
"Nossirree. Not if they're smart. If we did call for help they could hightail it out of here, pronto. The way Clair describes that ship, they could beat anything the Government has in the Belt, anything short of a battle-cruiser, and there ain't none out beyond Mars. No, if they're smart they'll have to figure that something went wrong with our radio, or we'd a called for help right away. It's an easy gamble for them to take—they can always zoom away."
Everything Gramps had said was beginning to make a lot of good sense, and I motioned him to continue.
"Sooo, their war of nerves is easy. They just wait for us to make the first wrong move, and then they get us. Blop! Real simple with a disintegrator."