“What happened?” she wanted to know.

“We all went to sleep together. My guess is gas. Stun guns don’t work across a vacuum.”

“Oh!” It was a gasp of outrage. She’d spotted the gaping hole in her control board, as smooth and rounded as the hole in the door. The gap where the hyperwave radio ought to be.

“Right,” I said. “We’ve been boarded, and we can’t tell anyone about it. Now what?”

“That hole…” She touched the rounded metal with her fingertips.

“Slaver disintegrator, I think. A digging tool. It projects a beam that suppresses the charge on the electron, so that matter tears itself apart. If that’s what it was, we’ll find the dust in the air filters.”

“There was a ship,” said Margo. “A big one. I noticed it just after I ended the show. By then it was inside the mass limit. I couldn’t go into hyperspace until it left.”

“I wonder how they found us.” I thought of some other good questions but let them pass. One I let out. “What’s missing? We’d better check.”

“That’s what I don’t understand. We aren’t carrying anything salable! Valuable, yes. Instruments for the base. But hardly black-market stuff.” She stood up. “I’ll have to go through the cargo hold.”

“Waste of time. Where’s the cargo mass meter on this hulk?”

“Oh, of course.” She found it somewhere among the dials. “No change. Nothing missing there, unless they replaced whatever they took with equivalent masses.”

“Why, so we wouldn’t know they were here? Nuts.”

“Then they didn’t take anything.”

“Or they took personal luggage. The lifesystem mass meter won’t tell us. Passengers move around so. You’d think they’d have the courtesy to stay put just in case some pirates should—ung.”

“What?”

I tasted the idea and found it reasonable. More. “Ten to one Lloobee’s missing.”

“Who?”

“Our famous, valuable Kdatlyno sculptor. The third Kdatlyno in history to leave his home planet.”

“One of the ET passengers?”

Oh, brother. I left, running.

Because Lloobee was the perfect theft. As a well-known alien artist who had been under the protection of Earth, the ransom he could command was huge. As a hostage his value would be equal. No special equipment would be needed; Lloobee could breathe Earth-normal air. His body could even use certain human food proteins and certain gaseous human anesthetics.

Lloobee wasn’t in the lounge. And his cabin was empty.

With Lloobee missing and with the hyperwave smashed, the Argos proceeded to Gummidgy at normal speed. Normal speed was top speed; there are few good reasons to dawdle in space. It took us six hours in hyperdrive to reach the edge of CY Aquarii’s gravity well. From there we had to proceed on reaction drive and gravity drag.