"We've done it," Jason said, cracking his helmet and smelling the cool air. "One billion credits. We've licked this bucket of bolts…"
"THIS IS A FINAL WARNING!" the voice boomed and their guns nosed about for the source before they realized it was just a recording, "THIS BATTLESHIP HAS BEEN ENTERED BY ILLEGAL MEANS. YOU ARE ORDERED TO LEAVE WITHIN THE NEXT FIFTEEN SECONDS OR THE ENTIRE SHIP WILL BE DESTROYED. CHARGES HAVE BEEN SET TO ASSURE THAT THIS BATTLESHIP DOES NOT FALL INTO ENEMY HANDS. FOURTEEN…"
"We can't get out in time!" Jason shouted.
"Shoot up the controls!"
"No! The destruction controls won't be here."
"twelve"
"What can we do?"
"Nothing! Absolutely nothing at all…"
"eight"
They looked at each other wordlessly. Jason put out his armored hand and Kerk touched it with his own.
"seven"
"Well, goodby," Jason said, and tried to smile.
"four… errrk. thre…"
There was silence, then the mechanical voice spoke again, a different voice. "De-mothballing activated. Defenses disarmed. Am awaiting instructions."
"What… happened?" Jason asked.
"De-mothballing signal received. Am awaiting instructions"
"Just in time," Jason said, swallowing with some difficulty. "Just in time."
"You should not have gone without me," Meta said. "I shall never forgive you."
"I couldn't take you," Jason said. I wouldn't have gone myself if you had insisted. You are worth more than a billion credits to me."
"That's the nicest thing you ever said to me." She smiled now and kissed him while Kerk looked on with great disinterest.
"When you are through, would you tell us what happened?" Kerk said. "The computer hit the right number?"
"Not at all. I did it." She smiled into the shocked silence, then kissed Jason again. "I told you how interested I am now in codes and ciphers, Simply thrilling, with wartime applications too, of course. Well, Shrenkly told me about substitution ciphers and I tried one, the most simple. Where the letter A is one, B is two and so forth. And I tried to put a word into this cipher and I did, but it came out 81122021, but that was two numbers short. Then Shrenkly told me that there must be two digits for each letter or there would be transcription problems, like you have to use 01 for A instead of just the number 1. So I added a zero to the two one-digit numbers, and that made ten digits, so for fun I fed the number into the computer and it was sent and that was that."
"The jackpot with your first number—with your first try?" Jason asked hollowly. "Wasn't that pretty lucky?"
"Not really. You know military people don't have much imagination; you've told me that a thousand times at least. So I took the simplest possible, looked it up in the Esperanto dictionary…"
"Haltu?"
"That's right; encoded it and sent it and that was that."
"And just what does the word mean?" Kerk asked.
"Stop," Jason said, "just plain stop."
"I would have done the same thing myself," Kerk said, nodding in agreement "Let us collect the money and go home."