The five invisible ships had been gone for over an hour, but the man in the shadow still did not move. He was on a neighboring chunk of floating iron, just a mile or two in diameter with a very slow rotation. St. George's asteroid would vanish below his horizon in a few minutes. The man pulled the telescope up to his face plate once again and scanned the area that had been the base on Z25. There had been no movement of any kind since the ships had rayed the site. He took a few more pictures for his files. The metal and quartz plating-all signs of human presence-had been completely destroyed, melted into the rock of the asteroid. The brilliant orange of superheated rock had quickly cooled in the near-absolute zero of airless space.
"Guess it's okay to go now," he thought. "Those space buzzards are not detail men-just grab and destroy without even looking around. Lucky for me."
The man went over to a small asteroid cruiser, built for speed in touring the Asteroid Belt. Stepping in, he sealed the airlock and pulled out a small recorder. He tuned in a complicated code and began to speak.
"Steve Cliff, reporting in to Oritz Konig on Mars Base." Steve went on to give the date, time, and location, and a brief but thorough report of what he had seen, from the time the Starmen landed on Z25 to the time the pirates' five ships had disappeared. He added to the file the pictures he had taken, and concluded, "Now returning to Yellow City. If you have anything else you'd like me to do, Oritz, contact me there. I don't have to tell you I'm pretty fond o' those boys and I was more'n delighted to keep an eye on 'em for you on this trip. Sorry this report isn't any better. I'll stop in and see Sim before I continue my trip back to Earth, just in case you leave a message for me there."
Having finished the recording, he put it into a small projectile with an automatic timer to release and send the message in three hours. Then he lifted off the small asteroid and headed toward Ceres. A few minutes after liftoff, he fired the projectile. When it sent its message, Steve Cliff would be far away and no one could trace the message back to his ship. On top of that, the message was encrypted and designed to travel on the microwaves similar to those in the background of space. It was highly unlikely that this message would make anyone curious. After the message had been sent, the projectile would break down into its component parts and scatter them into the infinity of space.