He saw Virginia's cheek quiver at the words, but she managed to restrain the smile.
"Our system was reached in your journey," Vor-Dergal continued, "and you swung aside to investigate our sister planet, Vendal. You were met by a guard ship before reaching Vendal and it fired upon you. Instead of turning back, you destroyed it with a tight-beam adaptation of your meteor disintegrator."
Vor-Dergal waited questioningly and Bob said:
"Our instruments showed us that the guard ship was robot-operated. They could discern nothing organic in the ship, nothing alive. The same instruments showed us that this planet, Vendal, possessed operating mines and factories and no organic life other than small animals. We knew that machines neither voluntarily build factories nor reproduce other machines, yet the mines and factories were operating. We thought it might be a world where the inhabitants had all died for some reason and the robots were still following the production orders given them when the race lived."
"And so you wilfully destroyed the guard ship that would have turned you back?"
"We did. It was a machine, operated by machines. And so far as we knew, it was protecting a race that had died a thousand years before. It was all a mystery and we wanted to find the answer to it."
Vor-Dergal and the others accepted the explanation without change of expression. Vor-Dergal resumed:
"Three more guard ships appeared when you were near Vendal. In the battle that followed, you severely damaged one of them. And when your ship was finally caught in the guard cruiser's tractor beams, you resisted the robots. When they boarded your ship, you destroyed several of them and were subdued only when the compartments of your ship were flooded with a disabling gas."
"That's true," Bob said.
"In summary: You deliberately invaded Tharnarian territory, deliberately damaged and destroyed Tharnarian ships, and would have landed on Vendal had the guard ships not prevented it.