"No, all the proof he had was in his log book, and that went with him on his last trip. But I read the log. He sighted the pirate camp on Callisto, and would have had pictures to prove it if all his film hadn't been raystruck. Maybe he could have got somebody to listen to him anyway if he had tried a little harder, but he wanted to make a research job of it. He sold out all his claims and built the Astra and loaded it up with equipment to bring back all the proof that even the Patrol could ask for. Then he blasted off and no one ever heard of him again." "But the idea of pirates doesn't make sense, Tom. There are no cargoes worth stealing beyond the Belt. On the Venus run, yes--but why should there be pirates out where there are no ships?" "Okay, no pirates, then. What they really are is Hassley and all those hangers-on of his that were never accounted for after the Polar War. One of the moons of Jupiter would make a fine hideout for them. Air, water, and a livable climate. When any one comes snooping around, they see to it that they never get back. We blame it on the Warp and stay away and leave them alone." "They would never get there in the first place. The Warp isn't just somebody's wild guess, you know. It follows from Heuvelstad's work. He derived Bode's law from quantum theory, and showed that a warp in space is the only explanation for the family of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter where there should be a single planet. No one can doubt it." "I can. No one used to doubt that the earth was flat, or to bring it a little more up to date, that the craters of the moon were volcanoes, or that the red shift in the nebular spectra meant that the universe is expanding. A theory is good only as long as it explains all the facts, and Heuvelstad overlooked the fact that my father circled Jupiter and came back. He will just have to revise his mathematics." "Maybe we'll know more about that after the Vesta expedition comes back." She sighed and looked out over the glittering bay. I sighed too, and took my arm away from the back of the seat. I didn't quite know how the conversation had wandered so far from the point. I had felt quite set up about everything when I came to the party. I thought Betty would be glad about the Translunar offer, and maybe remark that six thousand credits was a remarkable salary for a fresh graduate, and I would suggest that it was enough to get married on. And here we were arguing. She turned and looked at me again. "Tom," she said softly; maybe I was going to have my chance after all. "Yes?" I answered. "Are you really going to take that engineer job? Couldn't you talk Translunar out of something that would give you the chance to do the things a Denby ought to be doing?"