Except for that, Stony had played it smart all along. The only other mistake he made was at the end, when his gang came back into the cabin with the slug all snugged down in its shield. He let me crawl out first. It was black dark outside by now, and I jumped without even waiting to get to my feet. And this time I kept on jumping.

They didn't spend much time trying to find me. I was out of range of their headlights in two leaps, and why would Stony think it made any difference to have me floating in the dark, with no weapons? Of course he would have blasted me down before he took off if I had been on hand—I wasn't fooling myself about that—but he had too good a head for the main chance to waste time on such a minor pleasure. The way he had it figured, Betty and I would both be dead long before another ship touched Vesta, and even if we weren't, we would say we were raided by Venusian pirates, and he would be long gone.

They headed straight back to the ship, and Stony put as many of his crew as weren't needed for changing slugs to looting the blister. I could see their lights going back and forth for an hour, and then they all crawled into the ship and buttoned down.

I figured they wouldn't leave the blister standing, and I was right. One HE shell took care of that. Then they blasted off. I had my sextant and watch on them, and was writing down data on my knee-pad as fast as I could take them. I was using Altair and Vega for a fix, and throwing in Polaris every now and then for good measure. I kept it up most of the night. Their jet-flare winked out suddenly just before I lost them over the horizon.

After that there was nothing to do but go back to where the blister used to be and wait.

Betty came in just after the sun lifted over the horizon. She wouldn't let me get close enough to touch helmets so that I could explain. I gave up after a few attempts and we just sat.

It was a long wait. I rummaged around in the debris and rigged up some fair-sized sheets of dural to keep off the sun—one for me and one for Betty. At least she was willing to use it. After a while I poked around some more and found a copy of Spatial Navigation Tables that wasn't completely reduced to confetti, and started trying to work up my figures.

About noon the next day, Vesta time, we picked up the jet-flare of a ship breaking in. She came in fast, under about three G's of acceleration. That looked like Patrol style to me, and sure enough, as soon as the 

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