"All right, all right," Jason muttered, working to keep pace with the Pyrran's hustling form. This was what Pyrrans did best; it was an effort to keep up the pace.
"Repair robots," he said when they entered a long corridor, pointing to the tall, metal forms. "They won't bother us…"
Before he had finished speaking, the two robots had raised their welding torches and rushed to the attack. But the instant that they moved, Kerk's gun blasted twice, blowing them into instant junk.
"The ship's computer is too smart. It will turn anything against us. Stay alert and cover my back."
There was no more time for talking. They changed their course often, so it would not be obvious that they were heading toward cent control. Every machine along the way wanted to destroy them. Housekeeping robots rushed at them with brooms, TV screens exploded as they passed, airtight doors tried to close on them. The suddenly electrified floors arced and sputtered. It was a battle, but a one-sided one as long as they stayed alert. Their suits were invulnerable to small-scale attack and well insulated from electricity. In the end they came to a door marked centra kontrolo. Kerk offhandedly blasted it open and floated through. The lights were lit, the room and the controls were spotlessly clean.
"We've done it," Jason said, looking at the pressure gauge, then cracking his helmet and smelling the cool air. "One billion credits. We've licked this bucket of bolts. "
"THIS IS A FINAL WARNING," the voice boomed, and their guns nosed about for the source before they realized it was just a recording. "THIS BATTLESHIP HAS BEEN ENTERED BY ILLEGAL MEANS. YOU ARE ORDERED TO LEAVE WITHIN THE NEXT FIFTEEN SECONDS OR THE ENTIRE SHIP WILL BE DESTROYED. CHARGES HAVE BEEN SET TO ASSURE THIS BATTLESHIP DOES NOT FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS. FOURTEEN…"
"We can't get out in time!" Jason shouted.
"Shoot up the controls!"
"No! The destruction controls won't be here."
"TWELVE—"
"What can we do?"
"Nothing! Absolutely nothing at all…!"
"EIGHT—"
They looked at each other wordlessly. Jason put out his armored hand and Kerk touched it with his own.
"SEVEN—"
"Well, goodbye," Jason said, and tried to smile.
"FOUR. errrk. THR—"
There was silence; then the mechanical voice spoke again, a quieter voice. "De-mothballing activated. Defenses disarmed. Am awaiting instructions."
"What. happened?" Jason asked.
"De-mothballing signal received. Am awaiting instructions."
"Just in time," Jason said, swallowing with some difficulty. "Just in time." He fumbled with the unfamiliar controls until he finally turned on the communicator. Meta's face glared from the screen at him.
"Is that where you got to! You should not have gone without me and I shall never forgive you."
"I couldn't take you," Jason said. "I wouldn't have gone myself if you had insisted. You are worth more than a billion credits to me."
"That's the nicest thing you ever said to me." She smiled now and blew him a kiss. Kerk grunted and looked on with great disinterest.
"When you are through, would you tell us what happened?" he said. "Did the computer hit the right number?"
"Not at all. I did it." She smiled into the shocked silence. "I told you how interested I am now in codes and ciphers. Simply thrilling, with many military applications, too, of course. Shrenkly told me about substitution ciphers and I tried one, the most simple. Where the letter A is one, B is two and so forth. Next I put a word into this cipher but it came out 81122021, which was two numbers short. Then Shrenkly told me that there must be two digits for each letter or there would be transcription problems, like you have to use 01 for A instead of just the number. So I added a zero to the two one-digit numbers, and that made ten digits. Then I fed the number into the computer and it was sent and that was that."
"The jackpot with your first number — with your first try?" Jason asked hollowly. "Wasn't that pretty lucky?"
"Not really. You know military people don't have much imagination. You must have told me that a thousand times at least. So I took the simplest possible, looked it up in the Esperanto dictionary. "
"Haltu?"
"That's right. I encoded it and sent it. And that was that."
"And just what does that word mean?" Kerk asked.
"Stop," Jason said, "just plain stop."
"I would have done the same thing myself," Kerk said, nodding in agreement. "Let us collect the money and go home."
Private Truscoe and the captain had left the truck, parked out of sight in the jungle, then had walked a good hundred yards farther down the road. They were crouched now in the dense shadows of the trees, with the silver light of the full moon picking out every rut and hollow of the dirt track before them.
