She sighed.
"Look, I don't care," she said. "You probably saved
two lives today, so I'm not about to fault you for a secu-
rity violation. What I want to know is something differ-
ent."
"What?"
"Was it sabotage?"
And there it was. I had felt it coming.
"No," I said. "It was not. There were some short
circuitsч"
"Bull," she told me.
"I'm sorry. I don't understandч"
"You understand, all right. Somebody gimmicked
that thing. You undid it, and it was trickier than a cou-
ple of short circuits. And there was a bomb. We monitored
its explosion off the port bow about half an hour ago."
"You said it," I said. "I didn't."
"What's your game?" she asked me. "You cleaned up
for us, and now you're covering up for somebody else.
What do you want?"
"Nothing," I said.
I studied her. Her hair was sort of reddish and she
had freckles, lots of them. Her eyes were green. They
seemed to be set quite far apart beneath the ruddy line of
her bangs. She was fairly tallчlike five-tenчthough she
was not standing at the moment I had danced with her
once at a shipboard party.
"Well?"
"Quite well," I said. "And yourself?"
"I want an answer."
"To what?"
"Was it sabotage?"
