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Art Kuzak's reply had an undercurrent of jubilance, as if whatever he knew now was better than he had expected. "Second phase is en route. Joe will be along... Don't be surprised..." Joe Kuzak's approach, a few hundred hours later, made a luminous cluster in the sky, like a miniature galaxy. It resolved itself into vast bales, and all of the stellene rings storage and factory of Post Three.
"Hi, Art and Joe it's us," Ramos almost apologized. "Yeah we don't quite know yet what Tiflin is pulling. But here we are if it's you we're talking to..." There was the usual long wait as impulses bridged the light-minutes. Then Art Kuzak's voice snarled guardedly. "I hear you, Ram and Nel. Come in, if you can...! Tif, you garbage! Someday...! This is all. This is all..." The message broke off.
The slender beams could comb it futilely and endlessly, in the hope of a fortunate accident. Only once they heard, "Nelsen! Ra..." The beam swept on. It could have been Joe Kuzak's voice. But inevitably, somewhere, there had to be a giving up point for the searchers. "This is where I came in," Nelsen said bitterly. "Damn these beam systems that are so delicate and important!"
"That might be an answer," he said. They plopped where they were, and tried to rest until the orbiting cluster of rings emerged from Earth's shadow into blazing sunshine, again. Then Mitch and Frank returned to their own bubbs to check on the acceleration. It was soon plain that Joe Kuzak's bubb, towing Tiflin's drum, would lag. "Hell!" Art Kuzak snapped.
"So long, all you dumb slobs!" his voice hissed in their helmet-phones. "Now I get really lost! If you ever cross my path again, watch your heads..." Art Kuzak's flare of anger died. "Good riddance," he breathed. "How long will he last, alone? Without a space-fitness card, the poor idiot probably imagines himself a big, dangerous renegade, already."
He thought he was cautious when he said, "We're riding a bit heavy for you guys..." But after the twenty minute interval it took to get an answer back over ten light-minutes of distance traversed twice 186,000 miles for every second, spanned by slender threads of radio energy which were of low-power but of low-loss low-dispersal, too, explaining their tremendous range Art Kuzak's warning was carefully cryptic, yet plain to Nelsen and his companions.
Joe Kuzak's answering tone almost had a shrug in it. "Don't jinx our luck, twin brother," he said. "For that matter, how long will we last...? Mex, did you toss Tiflin back his shiv?" "A couple of hours ago," Ramos answered mildly.
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