Regulations provide

"Head out at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic," he ordered. To his companions, he said, "You three go down and watch the engines. When the sub-cees get up to limit, I'll come back there and try to throw in the manuals on the super-cee."

The three men ducked awkwardly through the low corridors. The ship was designed with paragravity controls for horizontal walking instead of vertical climbing.

Fortunately, the Neranians were no more than a foot shorter than the Earthmen. Occasionally, there were ships in which it was impossible for a man to get about through the small openings that fitted the builders.

As the ship sped swiftly upward, Joe watched the indicators. As far as he could see, everything was functioning well.

"All right," he said to the Neranians. "I'll go back and try the super-cee from the engine room. If it works all right, you cut it out after a couple of minutes, and we'll work on it from up here. You have to cut it off, remember. Once it's on, we can't get into it from down there because of the field buildup."

The creatures gave the Neranian equivalent of a nod. Joe ducked and clumped his way through the low, narrow passages to the far rear of the ship.

"There is nothing wrong with this ship," said Litchfield. "We've gone over every item of the super-cee."

"Well, we'll soon know. Get behind the shield." Joe stepped up to the intricate panel. The manipulations were extremely involved and required great exactness to keep the ship from vanishing in very small particles of stardust when the faster-than-light drive came on. Finally, it was done, and he squeezed a pair of handles, the Neranian equivalent of a relay push button. Instantly, a copper haze surrounded the mass of equipment beyond the panels, and the meter needles swung over.

"See?" said Litchfield. "Nothing wrong with it."

Joe watched the panels in silence. The engineer was right. There was no question about it. But why had the Neranians come to him with a perfectly good ship and asked for repairs?

"Let's go back and have a talk with our friends," he said. There's just the bare possibility that there's trouble in the relays and these birds didn't have sense enough to try the engine room manuals before yelling for help."

The four of them left the engine room, swinging the automatic bulkhead door behind them. The next chamber through which they passed was a mechanical storage room.

Joe pushed on and shoved against the next bulkhead door. He shoved again, then leaned on it hard and swore. "What goes on?"

Suddenly, Litchfield went to the barrier behind them and pushed. It was locked. The engineer matched Joe's swearing and looked at his boss.

"Locked — the mechanicals controlled from up front. Does it make sense?"

Joe expelled air slowly through his teeth. "It begins to," he said. "It begins to."

"I don't get it," said young Barnes, the technician. Fear edged his voice.

"This ship is hot," said Joe. "That's our answer."

"Hot?" said Hamilton. "You mean radioactive? We checked —"

"No. It's a vulvar term common in my Dad's day. There was some of it then, but almost none now. It means that those two clamshells up front just took off with the ship without asking anybody's permission. In plain language, they stole it."

"I don't follow you," said Litchfield.

"They aren't Neranians at all. They must be very closely related, but they're not the same species. We should have known that by the absence of the mensa. That story about surgical modification is a lot of guff.

"This ship is designed for operation by mensa. There are handles and buttons and wheels, but nothing to fit the claws of that pair up front."

"Well, it still doesn't make sense. Why did they come to us? Why all the talk about failure of the super-cee? Most of all, where do we go from here?"

"I suspect they're probably a pair of pretty desperate criminals. Thugs are thugs in any language — and generally not very bright. Setting the automatic controls of the super-cee requires fine digital manipulation. They simply couldn't do it. They've come on sub-cee from wherever they swiped the ship. They didn't even know about the engine manuals, I suppose, or else they couldn't even set them. They hoped to get us to start the thing on automatics, and then planned to get rid of us somehow. It might have been a little tough unless they have weapons that would go through these suits easily. But we made if perfectly simple for them, bless our little hearts. We offered to walk right into their trap.

"As to where we go from here — I don't think they're worrying much about it. But we'd better. Probably the only atoms of free oxygen aboard are in these tanks of ours. Mine says" — he scanned the indicators beside the viewplate in front of his face — "about six hours to go."

"I've got eight," said Litchfield. "Maybe we could even it up some way."

"Mine's seven," said Hamilton, "and we can't even it up. There's no provision for decoupling the tanks in an atmosphere like this. Which is a neat piece of design."