Space-suited complete, except for helmets, and with those ready at hand, Kinnison and VanBuskirk sat in the tiny control room of their lifeboat as it drifted inert through interstellar space. Kinnison was poring over charts taken from the Brittania’s pilot room; the sergeant gazed idly into a detector plate.
Brittania’s“No clear ether yet, I don’t suppose,” the captain remarked, as he rolled up a chart and tossed it aside.
“No let-up for a second; they’re not taking any chances at all. Found out where we are? Alsakan ought to be hereabouts somewhere, hadn’t it?”
“I’ve got our coördinate roughly. Alsakan would be fairly close for a ship, but it’s out of the question for us. Nothing much inhabited around here, either, apparently; to say nothing of being civilized. Scarcely one to the bloc
