But Ali was not to be shaken out of his usual dim view of the future.  “All right—­so we land, blaster in hand, and take the place.  And they get off one little squeak to the Patrol.  Well, a short life but an interesting one.  And we’ll make all the Video channels for sure when we go out with rockets blasting.  Nothing like having a little excitement to break the dull routine of a voyage.”

“We aren’t going to, are we—­” Dane protested, “land armed, I mean?”

Ali stared at him and Rip, to Dane’s surprise, did not immediately repudiate that thought.

“Sleep rods certainly,” the Astrogator-apprentice said after a pause.  “We’ll have to be prepared for the moment when they find out who we are.  And you can’t re-set a hydro in a few minutes, not when we have to keep oxgy on for the others.  If we were able to turn that off and work in suits it’d be a quicker job—­we could dump before we set down and then pile it in at once.  But this way it’s going to be piece work.  And it all depends on the agents at the Stat whether we have trouble or not.”

“We had better break out the suits now,” Ali added to Rip’s estimate of the situation.  “If we set down and pile out wearing suits at once it will build up our tale of being poor wrecked spacemen—­”

Sleep rods or not, Dane thought to himself, the whole plan was one born of desperation.  It would depend upon who manned the E-Stat and how fast the Free Traders could move once the Queen touched her fins to earth.

“Knock out their coms,” that was Ali continuing to plan.  “Do that first and then we don’t have to worry about someone calling in the Patrol.”

Rip stretched.  For the first time in hours he seemed to have returned to his usual placid self.  “Good thing somebody in this spacer watches Video serials—­Ali, you can brief us on all the latest tricks of space pirates.  Nothing is so wildly improbable that you can’t make use of it sometime during a checkered career.”

He glanced over the board before he brought his hand down on a single key set a distance apart from the other controls.  “Put some local color into it,” was his comment.

Dane understood.  Rip had turned on the distress signal at the Queen’s nose.  When she set down on the Stat field she would be flaming a banner of trouble.  Next to the wan dead lights, set only when a ship had no hope of ever reaching port at all, that signal was one every spacer dreaded having to flash.  But it was not the dead lights—­not yet for the Queen.

Working together they brought out the space suits and readied them at the hatch.  Then Weeks and Dane took up the task of tending their unconscious charges while Rip and Ali prepared for landing.

There was no change in the sleepers.  And in Jellico’s cabin even Queex appeared to be influenced by the plight of its master, for instead of greeting Dane with its normal aspect of rage, the Hoobat stayed quiescent on the floor of its cage, its top claws hooked about two of the wires, its protruding eyes staring out into the room with what seemed closed to a malignant intelligence.  It did not even spit as Dane passed under its abode to pour thin soup into his patient.