"To avoid only those whose courses will intersect yours would demand some sort of course predicting gear that would read the course of the oncoming meteor and apply it in a space problem to the predicted course of the ship. That's just too much machinery, Doug. So spacecraft merely turn aside for anything that even _looks_ close. They don't take any chances at all," said Don Channing. "They can't afford to." "Suppose that the ship ducked a big shower and it went so far out of course that they missed Mars?" "That's out, too," laughed Channing. "Why?" "A standard ship of space is capable of hitting it up at about four G all the way from Terra to Mars at major opposition and end up with enough power and spare cathodes to continue to Venus in quadrature. Now the velocity of the planets in their orbits is a stinking matter of miles per second, while the top speed of a ship in even the shortest passage runs up into four figures per second. You'd be surprised at what velocity you can attain at one G for ten hours." "Yes?" "It runs to slightly less than two hundred and fifty miles per second, during which you've covered only four million miles. In the shortest average run from Venus to Terra at conjunction, a skimpy twenty-five million miles, your time of travel is a matter of twenty-five hours odd, running at the standard two G. Your velocity at turnover--or the halfway point where the ship stops going _up_ from Terra and starts to go _down_ to Venus--is a cool five hundred miles per second. So under no condition would the ship miss its objective badly enough to cause its complete loss. Why, this business is run so quickly that were it not for the saving in time and money that amounts to a small percentage at the end of each flight, the pilot could head for his planet and approach the planet asymptotically." "You know what you're doing, don't you?" asked the reporter. "I think so." "You're forcing my mind into accepting something that has never happened before, and something that has no basis for its--" "You mean piracy? I wonder. We've all read tales of the Jolly Roger being painted on the side of a sleek ship of space while the pirate, who is a fine fellow at heart though uninhibited, hails down the cruiser carrying radium. He swipes the stuff and kisses all the women whilst menacing the men with a gun-hand full of searing, coruscating, violently lethal ray pistol. But that sounds fine in stories. The trick is tougher than it sounds, Douglas. You've got to catch your rabbit first." "Meaning?" "Meaning that finding a ship in space to prey upon is somewhat less difficult than juggling ten billiard balls whilst riding a horse blindfolded. Suppose you were to turn pirate. This is what would happen: