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"Sound off," he said cheerfully. "We've got a prize for you." "Stand by, we're boarding you," the Patrol sent back. "And put your weapons aside." Four scooters broke from the side of the Patrol ship. Greg activated the airlock. Five minutes later a man in Patrol uniform with captain's bars stepped into the control cabin, a stunner on ready in his hand. Three Patrolmen came in behind him.
The man got off the seat and Rick saw that he was over six feet tall, and built like a sapling. The boy also saw that he wasn't as young as he at first appeared. That was odd, because the peddlers on scooters were usually either very young or old. The Frostola man opened the seat box and the boys looked in, at neat stacks of ice cream packaged in various ways.
The beam hit the man's leg, dumping him to the deck, and bounced off to catch the second one. But now there was another sound, coming from the corridor behind him. Voices, shouts, clanging of boots. He pressed against the wall, listening. The sounds were from below. They must have gotten past Johnny ... probably the men on the scooters. Tom looked around helplessly.
"Which is the male and the female?" and so on. At other times I would be pestering the staff to answer more complicated and detailed questions about the habits of snakes. Workers are a mine of information and all of it is knowledge gained from practical experience. Some nights we went frog catching. We used to go after dinner on scooters to a river about 10 kms away. The method was simple.
"Maybe not," Tom said, "but I'd like to take a look at that asteroid before we give up." They paused in the big ore-loading lock to reclamp their pressure suit helmets, and looked down at the jagged chunk of rock a hundred yards below them. In the lock they had found scooters ... the little one-man propulsion units so commonly used for short distance work in space ... but decided not to use them.
Even as they watched, a pair of scooters broke from the side of the Ranger and slid down toward the sun side of the asteroid. "I don't know," Johnny said. "I think they intended to stay hidden, until Tom lost control of his bumper, and got far enough around there to spot them." He frowned as the first scooter touched down on the asteroid surface. "Can't we fire on them?" Greg said angrily.
Ringed now about the Queen were the buildings of Terraport. Yes, any attempt to attack the ship would endanger too much of the permanent structure of the field itself. Rip had brought them down not on the rocket scarred outer landing space but on the concrete apron between the Assignment Center and the control tower a smooth strip usually sacred to the parking of officials' ground scooters.
There was a ring of big two-hundred-foot conveyers a mile out; they would carry the armor and the airborne infantry and the little two-man scooters of the air-cavalry, from the Service and Industrial Sectors.
Samuel added; shading his eyes with his hand and peering out upon the gleaming surface of the bay, over which the white sails of scooters were darting like a flock of huge, single-winged birds. "Eph's racing with Captain Bill Green," replied the newspaper man. "Captain Bill's got an extra set of new runners at the side of his scooter and wants to test them.
Angy's secret hope that Abe would change his mind and abandon the projected trip to the Beach remained unfulfilled, in spite of the fact that cold weather suddenly descended on the South Side, and the bay became first "scummed" over with ice, and then frozen so solid that all its usual craft disappeared, and the "scooters" took possession of the field.
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