It was the Hecla, though. Naturally! But the return of a radar pulse came only after many surges of radar radiation following the crewman's question.
Then the radar pulse did come back, and the Yarrow moved toward the reflection point. This, obviously, had to be in normal space, with stars. In terms of miles traveled, the pursuit of the distant object was trivial. But Trent had not only to overtake it but to match velocities. It was a rather painful operation, but in time it was accomplished. The Hecla floated alongside the Yarrow, presently, and Trent leaped the space between the big steel hulls. Arrived, he crawled along the Hecla's hull to the open airlock door through which he'd left it many days before. He swung in and released his lifeline. The lock door closed. In minutes the Hecla ceased to accelerate and the Yarrow shot ahead and the mate had to bring her back around and come alongside again.
Then there was fine and finicky maneuvering. Ultimately the two ships touched gingerly. Cargo doors opened, facing each other. Cargo from the Yarrow went aboard the wrecked Hecla. Men went about the inside of that ship, searching for the places where solid-shot missiles had penetrated. Some of them were to be stopped, not all. There was violent activity of other sorts. Tanks of air went from one ship to the other, police equipment bought on Dorade, Shaped-charge explosive packages, satchel-bombs, food and water.
Trent went back aboard the Yarrow for final consultation with the mate.
"You'll head for Sira," he commanded. "We didn't make delivery of everything I agreed to sell on Sira. You can finish up with that. Then you can go on to Manaos. Here are some cargo lists and prices. You can unload this stuff for these prices. Understand?" The mate nodded.
"If all goes well," Trent told him, "I'll come into port on Manaos. You can wait for me there for three weeks. Then if you like you can hunt for me along here." He indicated an area on a three-dimensional chart of this part of the Pleiad cluster. "If you don't find us in a reasonable time go back to Manaos. Maybe we'll have made it. If we aren't there then, you're the Yarrow's skipper. In which case, look out for McHinny. He means well but he's a fool. Don't ever take his advice!"
The mate nodded again. He looked acutely unhappy. Presently the Yarrow drew away from the Hecla. That round-bellied cargo-carrier of space looked intact. It wasn't. Its overdrive coil was blown and its Lawlor drive patched for strictly emergency use. It was empty of air and there were shell-holes in its plating.
The Yarrow went into overdrive. It vanished. The Hecla was left alone.
In a way, it was curiously like the occasion when a barkentine of an earlier time had been found by an earlier Captain Trent, battered by cannon balls and leaking, with its masts shot overside and its boats long gone. This was in a sea where Captain Trent was bitterly unwelcome, so much so that a man-of-war had been assigned especially to hunt for him. But he went aboard the derelict with hands from his proper crew, and his proper ship sailed away leaving him to make what he could of the situation.
It was quite a similar state of things, except that the Captain Trent of the Yarrow was aboard a derelict of space, and the ship that wanted ferociously to find him was a pirate.
It was now very nearly ready to resume its professional activities.
IV
There were no oxyhydrogen torches to be burned for the refitting of the Hecla for space. There was nothing for incurious stars to see. Mere plastic sealings would have closed the shot-holes in her double hull, but Trent forbade it for the time being. Every other repair went smoothly. There was no reason for spaceboats to stir in the metal blisters which were their proper repositories. There was no particular reason for anything at all, in the way of visible repairwork, to be performed upon the fabric of the Hecla. She lay seemingly motionless in that emptiness and quietude and remoteness which is between-the-stars. That extra air tanks had been taken aboard, and tools, and food and water and certain eccentric equipment designed for planetary police forces; that these things, formerly absent, were now present in the Hecla's hull could not be discovered from outside it. The Hecla lay still, matronly, clumsy, bewilderedly acquiescent in her doom. The stars regarded her without interest or curiosity.
Trent sealed off certain areas inside the ship, filled them with air from the ship's reserves, and put his new recruits to the rewinding of the overdrive coil. He himself made a good repair to an emergency-patched cable in the Lawlor drive casing. Also, with painstaking care he set the tape-recorded log to register such actions as took place after the Hecla's reoccupation.
It wasn't on the whole a very difficult business. Hundreds of ships had blown their overdrive coils and rewound them in space and gone sedately on about their lawful occasions.
Thousands had had trouble with their Lawlor drives, but like all superlatively difficult achievements the design of those useful engines was so blessedly simple that nobody felt incapable of the work that would make them whole and functioning again.
Trent did do a certain amount of stage dressing, though. His crew for the Hecla, recruited on Sira, had cherished very unusual hopes. They expected high excitement out here, and it would have been anticlimactic to set them at a far from routine but by no means hazardous salvage operation. So Trent dressed it up.
He let only the parts of the ship necessary for the repair of the drives and a reasonable living space be refilled with air. Most of the ship remained empty, with shot holes unplugged. He painstakingly led his followers, two by two and in spacesuits, through the less frequently visited and now airless parts of the ship. They came to know their way about the bilges, through all the air-seal doorways, until they were able to move from any part of the ship to any other without appearing in the regularly used areas. And he had them carry small arms on these occasions.
It was largely stage dressing, but not wholly that. Trent still had to think of possibilities. He was not exactly certain that the pirate which had wrecked the Hecla was itself destroyed. He prepared against the possibility that it was not, by charming his crewmen with prospects of lurid action. They learned and rehearsed battle tactics and in so doing prepared to be attacked. If the pirate ship should appear, Trent and his followers were prepared. If it didn't, nevertheless he'd keep up the continual alert until he brought the Hecla to ground again, and then a reasonable bonus for work done and danger undergone would satisfy everybody. He'd be under no obligation to explain his precautions once they'd ended.
There were personal angles to the matter, too. He'd taken Marian Hale out of a very unpleasant situation. But there is something about the relationship between men and women which obligates a man who's done a woman one favor to do her another and another indefinitely. Trent had meant to salvage the Hecla from the moment of the pirate's disappearance in overdrive, when the Hecla was left helpless in space. If Marian had been another man, even the Hecla's owner, Trent could have admitted his intentions frankly or even discussed the method and the practicability of the job. But once he'd taken Marian from the wrecked Hecla, if they advanced to a state of cordial friendship he'd be under an obligation to do her the second favor of doing the salvage for at most the cost of the operation, because it belonged to her father. The fact was illogical but it was still a fact.