He wasn't kidding. All you had to do was disintegrate a person, his ship, his belongings, and you'd have committed a pretty air-tight murder. Of course, the old legality about a corpse had been chucked out the window years ago when the first disintegrators were developed, but in a case like this, the only thing the government would have to go on was the fact that our landing here on 4270 had been recorded. Not much. Pitifully inadequate. And I told them that now.
"Swell," Clair said. "Only please, Jerry, cut it out. You sound like you're crying at your own funeral. I'm scared...."
"Sure," said Gramps, "we ain't licked. We'll just have to figure out a war of nerves just a bit better than theirs. War of nerves, that's it. I can remember, outside Gossena.... The Ruskies employed Martian mercenaries, y'know...."
"That won't be easy," Clair reminded him. "Especially since we don't even know why that ship came here. We can't even find out."
I grinned. "Who says we can't?" I picked up my fishbowl helmet and plopped it ungently over my head.
"What the heck are you doing?" Clair asked me.
My voice must have sounded muffled from under the helmet as I said: "Simple. Our intercom can pick up theirs. As soon as some of them pop outside their dome and start talking, we'll know."
That much was true. The intercom could pick up any similar conversation on the entire tiny planet. It could do that, but it wasn't directional. In other words, you'd hear voices, all right, only you wouldn't know where they were coming from. One trouble, however, marred the idea: you couldn't tell how long it would be before some of our visitors decided to lift themselves up and venture outside the dome. Might be any time now, or it might not be for days, or it might be just once, and then briefly, for as long as it would take them to stroll to our dome, disintegrate the lock, march through, and turn us into three specks of molecular dust.
I sat grimly with the helmet over my head, waiting. All I got was static.