Alex turned wildly to Admiral Ron Bronz. “What are you doing?” he spluttered.

  “Admiral’s inspection before the Patrol embarks,” said the old Hoka. His cocked hat slipped down over his muzzle and he raised it with an irritated gesture. “Damn that tailor. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was a Malevonian agent.” His voice barked out over the waiting ranks of teddy bears. “Ten-SHUN! Inspection will proceed.”

  Solemnly, he and Captain Jax went down the line touching the nose of each spaceman to see that it was cold and moist. Alex groaned.

  “All in good health, sir,” said the admiral as returned. “All clear and on green.” His cocked hat slipped down again. Alex found it strangely disconcerting to be addressing now a face and now a hat.

  “But—but—but—” he stammered.

  Lon Meters leaned over and said to Jax Bennison in a clearly audible whisper. “Something wrong with the Coordinator, Captain? You suppose the Malevonians have gotten control of his mind?”

  “Of course not,” said Jax. “They wouldn’t dare. It’s just his crusty way. He has a rough exterior but a heart of gold.”

  Admiral Bronz turned to Alex. “Well, sir, the men are ready,” he reported. “Would you make a brief but touching speech before they take off?”

  A hundred furry countenances turned expectantly to Alex where he stood in the moonlight. He raised a shaky voice: “This nonsense has got to stop!”

  “That’s right, sir,” beamed Captain Jax. “We’ve got to stop the enemy.”

  “Go home to your wives and families!” screamed Alex, trying to rouse a sense of domestic duty. “Go home to your fireside brides!”

  “Aye,” shrilled the admiral. “When peace has come to the galaxy, we shall return to our homes.”

  “You’ve got your own work to do—” pleaded Alex.

  “Aye! Aye!” The falsetto cheers seemed to shake the city walls. “We’ve got to stop the foe!”

  “Form ranks!” barked Captain Jax. “Forward march!”

  A hundred Hokas faced the boat and tramped toward its airlock. A hundred voices lifted in song.

  Off we go, into the vacuum yonder,

  Climbing high, into the black,

  Shaking out ee-vil with fire and thunder,

  Blasting down to the attack!

  All the wo-o-orlds watch us in wonder

  Till our mi-i-ission is done.

  We’ll ride on high throughout the sky,

  For nothing can stop Patrol Ship Number One!

  “You encouraged them marvelously well, sir,” said the admiral.

  “Stop!” screamed Alex. He raced after the marching Hokas, trying to stem the tide.

  “The Coordinator!” yelled Lon Meters in a burst of happiness. “The Coordinator himself has decided to come with us!”

  Before Alex could catch his breath, he was caught up in the onward sweep. The press of a hundred solid little bodies forced him into the boat, up a companionway and onto the bridge. He heard the airlock clang shut behind him. There was no chance to open it again; all passages were jammed tight with shining-eyed Hokas.

  Captain Jax strapped himself into the pilot chair while Alex was still gibbering. “Ready to blast,” called a voice from the intercom. The engines growled.

  “Ready to blast,” echoed Captain Jax.

  “Stop!” shrieked Alex, recognizing in panic what was about to happen. “Stop, I say!”

  Nobody heard him. Captain Jax pulled the drive switch. Since he had not cut in the acceleration compensators, and Alex was not harnessed in place, the human was thrown back against a bulkhead and smashed into unconsciousness.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  Fuzzily, with ringing head, Alex struggled back to awareness. Through bleared eyes, he saw that he was alone on the bridge with Jax and Lon. They were bending anxiously over him.

  “Here,” said Jax, extending a flask. “Have a pull of Old Spaceman.”

  No matter what name it went under, Hoka liquor was potent stuff. Alex felt a measure of strength flow back into him with a gulp. He pulled his lanky frame up against the artificial gravity till he stood more or less erect. Then he glared.

  “Sorry, sir,” apologized the exec, Lon. “We didn’t realize you were too busy planning our strategy to have prepared for takeoff.”

  Alex clenched his teeth. “Where are we?” he mumbled.

  “Sir,” replied the captain, “we don’t know. After we went through the space warp, we lost orientation.”

  “Huh?” said Alex. “Went through the what?”

  “The space warp, sir,” explained Lon Meters.

  “Oh,” said Alex. For a moment the solemnity of the small Hoka was so convincing that he found himself wondering if the four years of astrogation courses he had taken had not perhaps been negligent in not mentioning this phenomenon.

  “Well, then,” said Captain Jax blandly, “you realize that we must be in a totally unfamiliar part of space. Maybe even in another universe. Observe.” He pointed to the viewscreen and the black, starry sky it showed. Alex goggled. Some of the constellations had certainly changed, though not much.

  The human’s brain began to function once more; he could almost feel it sweating. Video programs never mentioned the elaborate mathematics of astrogation, so the Hokas must have assumed that you simply aimed your spaceship where you wanted it to go. Finding themselves unable to locate their position, they had leaped to the conclusion that a space warp—whatever that might be—had thrown them off course.

  In fact, once they began taking the Tom Bracken program literally, everything else followed with a relentless kind of logic. The Pornian menace—they must have equated that with these Malevonians who, not content with mere rearmament, were apparently out to conquer the universe. They must have decided that the ostensible human plenipotentiary was really the Supreme Coordinator of the Space Patrol in disguise. Then they went ahead and organized their own unit and—and—

  Oh, no!

  “Where are we headed?” he asked.

  “Sir?” said Lon Meters.

  “Top secret,” snapped Captain Jax quickly. “Exec Meters, close your eyes and put your hands over your ears.” The other complied.

  “We had this Pornia in mind, sir,” resumed the captain. “It seems to be the local center of enemy operations. But now that we’re lost—”

  “Well—” Alex was slowly recovering his equilibrium. “Never mind. We’re first going to have to figure out just where we are.”

  “That’s what I thought we were going to have to do,” said Captain Jax. “Exec Meters, you can open your eyes and ears. Do you think you can locate us, sir?”

  A vision of the paper work involved in that little chore floated through Alex’s head. As if it didn’t ache enough already! “I think so,” he groaned.

  “Excellent, Coordinator,” said Captain Jax. “You take over the chart room, and meanwhile the rest of us will maneuver the ship around and look for enemies.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Alex dismally. But there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it; and even at trans-light velocities, interstellar space is so big that their chances of barging into a star or planet were negligible. As for the boat, these roboticized models all but handled themselves, which was the reason a few semi-trained Hokas had been able to get her under way.

  “Of course,” said Captain Jax, “the Malevonians may be any place. Perhaps even now we are in the heart of their stronghold. If—”

  He was interrupted by a grizzled Hoka in an acid-stained smock who came indignantly into the bridge. “Sir,” he squeaked, “you’ve got to do something about that chief engineer.”

  “Do what?” asked the captain.

  “How should I know?” cried the newcomer, shaking his fists and dancing with rage. “Feed him to the bems. Make him walk the plank. Anything, just so he’ll quit bothering me!”

  “I don’t believe you’ve met this man, sir,” whispered Lon Meters to Alex. “Dr. Zarbovsky, our scientist. Quite mad, of course—but a genius.”

  “But if he’s mad,” said Alex, “then why—”

  “Every Patrol ship has a mad scientist, sir, as you well know,” said Lon firmly. “Tom Bracken’s, for instance.”

  “How can I build a new-type disintegrator if the engineer won’t let me have the busbars from the drive unit?” screamed Dr. Zarbovsky. “Answer me that!”

  Alex stepped into the breach. “There should be extra busbars in the storeroom,” he said diplomatically.

  “In the storeroom,” murmured Dr. Zarbovsky. “I never thought of that!” He hurried out again.

  Jax and Lon looked awestruck at Alex. “What a brain!” breathed the exec.

  “He wouldn’t be Coordinator if he didn’t have one,” said Jax proudly.

  “I wonder,” whispered Lon, “I wonder if he’s a mutant?”

  “I’m getting out of here!” snarled Alex. He slammed the door behind him. The two Hoka officers looked affectionately in his direction.

  “A crusty exterior,” said Lon, “but a heart of gold. Eh, Jax?”

  “On green, Lon,” agreed the captain.

  For the fortieth time, Alex’s coffee cup leaped into the air and splashed on the floor as the boat’s gravity beams ripped her through another sudden change of direction. Red-eyed from forty-eight hours with little sleep, he slammed his stylus down on the latest sheet of calculations and started to get up.

  A burry voice grumbled over the intercom: “Engine rroom to brridge. Chief Engineerr MacTavish speaking. Wha’ the hell d’ye think ye’re doing? Can ye no keep the ship on a level coorse forr five minutes straight?”

  “Sorry, Angus,” replied Captain Jax soothingly. “We’re dodging invisible space torpedoes.”

  Alex slumped back over the chart room desk, burying his face in his hands.

  “Oh, no,” he moaned. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.”

  He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers, thinking that at least this lunatic ride would soon be over. Be brave, he told himself. Chin up and all that sort of thing. Just a few more hours.

  Once he had pinpointed the boat in space, it had not been hard to calculate a path to Pornia’s sun. Now they were inside the Pornian System, moving at sub-light speed toward the only inhabited planet. The Hokas had naturally been enthusiastically in favor of going there to do battle.

  Well, they’d land, and then he’d turn them over to the Pornians who, possessing a military force, could arrest them and return them to Toka. It was a dirty trick for him to play on his little friends, but he had no choice. You just couldn’t allow this boatful of…of permanent children to go batting around the galaxy.

  An obbligato of Hoka voices filtered to him over the intercom from the bridge.

  “Rough section of space, this, captain.”

  “Space is like that, Lon. If the space tides don’t get you, the radiation madness does. You dodge a meteor to find yourself trapped in a Sargasso of deadly space weed. And if you manage to battle your way out of that by some miracle, you emerge to find yourself blasting on all jets straight into the middle of the Malevonian fleet.”

  Alex closed his eyes and hung on to the coffee-stained calculation sheets—the data needed to land on Pornia. He thought bitterly that there might be a cupful of cosmic dust between them and the next star, but that was all that could be expected…

  “Then there’s pirates—”

  “Like that one bearing down on us now?”

  “Don’t be jet-happy, Lon. No pirate would dare attack a Patrol ship.”

  “Well, if he isn’t a pirate, what’s he doing with the skull and crossbones painted on his ship?”

  “I don’t see any skull and crossbones.”

  “Well, I can’t see the skull either, but look at those red bloody crossbones on that white field.”

  “Great jumping comets, Lon, you’re right! Attention, all gun crews! Attention, all gun crews! Stand by for battle!”

  Struck by a sudden horrible suspicion, Alex flicked on the chart room’s little viewscreen. Swimming in the nearby void was a long spaceship with a red cross large on its side.

  “Stop!” roared Alex. “That’s a hospital ship!”

  He exploded out of the room and whizzed toward the bridge. Halfway there, he tripped over a small white-smocked figure.

  “Damn interference!” squeaked Dr. Zarbovsky. “Can’t let a mad scientist alone for a minute.” Then, recognizing Alex’s sprawled form: “Oh, sorry, sir. I was just coming to see you. Where can I get a one-farad condenser?”

  “Go to the devil,” raged Alex, picking himself up.

  ­“But we don’t have a devil on this ship,” said Dr. Zarbovsky plaintively.

  Alex was already running down the corridor. He burst into the bridge and skidded to a halt before the communications board.

  “Do you wish to take over, sir?” asked Jax.

  “I sure do,” gasped Alex.

  His fingers danced over the board as he sent a call to the other ship.

  The image of a Pornian—two meters tall, snake-limbed, with a flat green face sticking out of a high gold-braided collar—formed on the screen. “What’s up?” it demanded in the English of the spaceways. “Who are you?”

  “Never mind that,” said Alex impolitely. “Let me speak to your captain.”

  “Who are you?” repeated the Pornian in a stiff tone. “We are the Pornian Navy’s hospital ship Sudbriggan. Identify yourself, or else as aliens without passports you are liable to detention.”

  “Detention?” said Alex blankly. He hadn’t realized the arrogance of the new militarist government had gone that far. “You’re kidding!”

  The Pornians countenance turned chartreuse with anger. “Do you insult me?” he hissed. “You are under arrest. Stand by to be boarded.”

  Alex had a spine-chilling vision of himself explaining to Earth Headquarters just how he and a hundred of his wards came to be interned by the government of a notoriously touchy planet.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I was just about to leave.”

  Jumping up from the screen, he stepped over to the control panel. He was reaching for the main secondary-drive switch when a thunderous explosion rocked the Fearless. Alex felt himself hurled to the floor, his nose sideswiping a table on the way down.

  He rose, wiping blood from his face, and glared at Captain Jax. “What happened now?” he yelled.

  “Why, we opened fire,” said the Hoka, pointing to the viewscreen. It showed a portion of the Fearless’s exterior as well as the open sky. Smoke was whiffing into space from the cannon mouths. “We didn’t get the pirate Malevonian, though,” he added regretfully. “His force shield must already have been up.”

  If anybody, anywhere in the cosmos, has invented the legendary force screen, the Astrogation Improve­ment Authority of the Interbeing League will be very anxious to meet him, her, it, or xu. Alex took another horrified look at the Pornian ship. It was taking off sunward at full acceleration. The clumsy solid cannonballs had done no more than scratch its armored hull, but the captain had evidently had the fright of his life.

  The image of an Earth Headquarters Cultural Development Board was replaced in Alex’s unhappy mind by the picture of an Interbeing League court­room and one A. Jones on trial for armed assault. Since space piracy, being utterly impractical, had never occurred, perhaps the old laws about hanging pirates were still on the books. At the very least, no plenipotentiary who went around shooting up hospital ships could reasonably expect to keep his position. A certain dignity is demanded in such an office.

  Out of the welter of thoughts there was only one that emerged with any clarity. And that was to catch the Pornian before he could officially report what had happened, explain, apologize, and ask him not to file charges.

  “Full thrust ahead!” he bellowed, vaulting into the pilot chair and throwing down the grav-drive switch.

  The Hokas whooped with joy.

  “Trust us, Coordinator!” shouted Captain Jax. “They won’t escape!”

  —And the Fearless took off in pursuit.

  The Lord High Admiral of the Pornian Navy thundered at the shaken, tentacled figure in the screen before him.

  “What?”

  “Help! Help!” cried the figure. “Hospital ship Sudbriggan reporting. There’s a Space Patrol ship after me!”

  “A what?” cried the Lord High Admiral.

  “Space Patrol Ship Number One,” choked the figure. It added breathlessly: “They’ve got a secret weapon.”

  “What do you mean, Space Patrol ship?” roared the Admiral. “There’s no such thing as a Space Patrol.”

  “There is too!” shrieked the captain of the Sudbriggan. The Pornian Navy had not been in existence long enough to become well grounded in military courtesy. “And it’s gaining.”

  Ferociously, the Lord High Admiral punched a button. The communications center of the huge dreadnaught answered him.

  “Give me a long-range tracer,” rapped the Admiral. “Find out what’s behind this idiot.”

  Communications Center obliged.

  “Fearless calling Sudbriggan,” gasped Alexander Jones into an unresponsive screen. “Come in, Sudbriggan. Please come in, Sudbriggan!”

  The set flickered to life with the terrified figure of a Pornian who must be the exec of the hospital ship. He was waving his eye-stalks, too agitated to find English words. “Get me your captain,” said Alex. “I want your captain.”

  “N-n-no,” stammered the officer. “We shall defend our captain to the l-last enlisted man.”

  “Then your Admiral,” said Alex hoarsely. His contorted face looked more ferocious than he knew. “I must see your Admiral right away. This business has got to be stopped!”

  “Eek,” said the officer.

  “I’m doing my best,” pleaded Alex, “but if you don’t get me through to your Admiral I can’t answer for the consequences.”