"No. I need a few days to study these brains, and it will take a few days for that battleship mother ship of ours to get into her assigned position, where we can steal her most easily." DuQuesne, however, did not at once remove his headset, but remained standing in place, silent and thoughtful. "Uh-huh," agreed Loring. "I'm thinking the same thing you are. Suppose that it _is_ Seaton that's got them all hot and bothered this way?" "The thought has occurred to me several times, and I have considered it at some length," DuQuesne admitted at last. "However, I have concluded that it is not Seaton. For if it is, he must have a lot more stuff than I think he has. I do not believe that he can possibly have learned that much in the short time he has had to work in. I may be wrong, of course; but the immediately necessary steps toward the seizure of that battleship remain unchanged whether I am right or wrong; or whether Seaton was the cause of this disturbance." * * * * * When the conversation was thus definitely at an end, Loring again incased himself in his space suit and set to work. For hours he labored, silently and efficiently, at transferring enough of their Earthly possessions and stores to render possible an extended period of living aboard the vessel of the Fenachrone. He had completed that task and was assembling the apparatus and equipment necessary for the rebuilding of the power plant before DuQuesne finished the long and complex computations involved in determining the direction and magnitude of the force required to give the _Violet_ the exact trajectory he desired. The problem was finally solved and checked, however, and DuQuesne rose to his feet, closing his book of nine-place logarithms with a snap. "All done with _Violet_, Doll?" he asked, donning his armor. "Yes." "Fine! I'll go aboard and push her off, after we do a little stage-setting here. Take that body there--I don't need it any more, since he didn't know much of anything, anyway--and toss it into the nose compartment. Then shut that bulkhead door, tight. I'm going to drill a couple of holes through there from the _Violet_ before I give her the gun." "I see--going to make us _look_ disabled, whether we are or not, huh?" "Exactly! We've got to have a good excuse for our visirays being out of order. I can make reports all right on the communicator, and send and receive code messages and orders, but we certainly couldn't stand a close-up inspection on a visiplate. Also, we've got to have some kind of an excuse for signaling to and approaching our mother battleship. We will have been hit and punctured by a meteorite. Pretty thin excuse, but it probably will serve for as long a time as we will need."