"You'll effect pursuit at once, Kenton. Take what armament your maintenance can fabricate. If he is simply attempting escape, he'll find there's not far he can go. Since he is an inexperienced pilot, you should be able to overhaul him with little difficulty. However, the more logical probability is that he's defecting to them. He undoubtedly has the microstats in his possession, and will rendezvous with one of their own orbit craft. It will be your responsibility to destroy him before that rendezvous can be completed." "But sir, there's no way of being sure--" "Destroy him." My protest was completely lost to a cut contact and a dead screen. I muttered something and began a half-hearted attempt to contact McGinty. Between signals I scrawled a fast note and handed it to Knight. It told him to order an L-8 ready with an extra rocket unit bolted onto its stern someplace. For the extra power, he'd need a set of transition coordinates for a modified orbit, but that would be up to his department. The note said for Haliburton to take care of having maintenance rig up a couple of hydrazine torpedoes of some kind. Hell, we weren't even allowed pistols up here, and Kolomar had just said "destroy him." More official double-talk. But, sometimes a maintenance crew was good for something a little better than keeping the rust off door knobs. It was a pretty old rule-of-thumb in Space--if you haven't got it, make it. And right now, the responsibility for those stats was mine. All mine. I kept Loftus with me, and kept trying to raise McGinty. The chances were he wouldn't answer, of course. But there was nothing else to do until Haliburton and Knight buzzed me that they had everything ready. "Guess you'd better forget it," Loftus said. I nodded, tried a final signal pattern, and then quit trying. I looked into Loftus' young face. It wasn't hard to read. "Go ahead and say it," I told him. He looked up, and his mouth twisted into a cynical smile. "We all fall for happy accordion music and an Irish brogue. All fall for a guy because he appeals to what there is inside people like us that says some guys you can always trust. Maybe, Ken, we deserve to be second-raters." "Maybe," I said. Only I was thinking about men like Kolomar. About right and wrong, success and failure, always in terms of physical size, physical strength. Whomp me and I'll whomp you back harder. Twenty-first century civilization--still the spoiled brats of a half century ago. "Maybe we do," I said, and wondered if we always would. "What was it McGinty was always saying?" Loftus asked quietly. "Something about--'the further out y'go, the more th' edge y'got--an' leave all the other dir-rty business behind besides.'" "Your brogue smells, kid. But that's about the way it went." "Somehow, I never thought he meant it, this way. Thought he had something else in mind. The way he always looked out the port when he played. At the stars." "I know, I know," I snapped. "Can it, can it."