"And just what," Mike inquired, "were you planning to do about it besides having me shoot you by mistake?"
Millie held up an oversize pair of calipers. "The Security people," she said, "are not the only ones with weapons. I borrowed this from the machine shop."
Mike stared down at the odd-looking "weapon."
"It's hard," Millie continued, "to look at more than one thing at a time through a spacesuit helmet. I could've got 'em in the air hose while you held their attention."
Mike's chuckle was just a trifle ragged, and his mutter about blood-thirsty panthers didn't really go unheard as he began shucking his spacesuit.
This was the most dangerous point, Mike knew. The axis tube went from the observatory straight through to the south polar lock, with nothing to block sight or sound from traveling its length. They'd have to simply chance it. The spacesuits shucked, he opened the lock.
Their luck held. No Security man was stationed opposite the mouth of the axis tube at the south polar lock.
Halfway to the engineering quarters, Mike stopped, used a special key to open an inspection plate, and they dropped lightly into the huge shielding tank that now held only air. From there the pair back-tracked Mike's original path to the inspection plate in the engineering quarters, and so into his own bailiwick, where they found Ishie standing on catlike guard, a wrench in one hand, waiting for whatever might come up.
"Confusion say," the grinning Chinese physicist declared, "two for one is good luck."