‘Use the boosters, use the boosters!’ shouted Tolt.
Jannu retorted with equal desperation, ‘Not yet, not yet! We’ll be blown to bits if the beacons aren’t aligned.’
‘I’m sure Kulp meant the boosters to be operated now. The robots can’t hold the beacons in position without them.’
‘Are you sure you two do know how to operate this net?’ snarled the Mott. ‘You’d better not make any mistakes.’
‘We know, we know,’ Jannu tried to reassure him while he endeavoured to recall the sequence in which the beacons had to be armed. ‘We’ll have to, because Kulp isn’t likely to find his way back now.’
‘I’m beginning to think this isn’t such a good idea after all,’ the Mott decided with enough malevolence to convince the two engineers that, if they wanted to stay alive, they would have to succeed in activating the space-distort net without any marked mishap.
‘Wasn’t there something we have to do to compensate for the collapsar?’ Tolt whispered frantically to Jannu.
‘The net has already compensated for it,’ was the unhelpful reply.
‘No,’ hissed Tolt, ‘I mean now, while we’re still arming it?’
‘Can’t think of anything,’ Jannu desperately tried to remember. ‘If we don’t get a move on, Kulp is bound to think of some dirty trick to escape from the planet.’
‘Shall I start the countdown sequence now then? If we do think of anything, we can always compensate for it afterwards.’
‘At least this way we stand a chance of staying alive. Align the beacons.’
‘All right,’ said Tolt and began to order his remaining long-suffering robots to take their beacons to their firing positions.
Jannu watched the robots leave the chute to glide across the sky to their certain destruction. ‘Ex 8 89 isn’t responding.’
‘Hang Ex 8 89. What difference is one unarmed terminal going to make?’
‘I have a feeling we should know that.’ Jannu didn’t like to admit that he was unable to understand all of Kulp’s specifications. ‘There isn’t time to check without breaking the sequence.’
As Tolt and Jannu bumbled about in nervous confusion, the Mott commander’s four feet again became very agitated and seemed to do a little jig on the spot to stop him from galloping about the control room in rage. He was well aware of the procedure the Mott had for court-martials. The main thing that made them different from any other species’ was that the defendant was executed before the trial began. To their way of thinking this was more efficient, because they could always be found guilty on the grounds they had failed to give evidence in their defence. He knew. He had judged too many to suspect otherwise. It wasn’t until now, when his life was on the line, that he fancied there could have been some error in the way they were conducted. He cursed to think he had allowed himself to be cornered into this situation by two soft-centred, addle-brained, treacherous green things who also appeared to have the disconcerting habit of acquiring multi-coloured stripes. Fortunately the stripes had disappeared rapidly before his one eye’s limited discrimination became permanently offended. The only thing that prevented the Mott from airing his displeasure was the fact that his life was totally dependent on their muddled efforts to control something beyond their scope and very much further beyond his.