After the second disappearance, the CO swung into action. For starters, he had all the ships checked out from bow to stern—atomic pile, flight control systems, every nut and screw; one scratched dial and you were docked a week’s vacation. The timers in the transmitters had to be replaced—as if it were all their fault!—and ships on patrol were now required to radio back at eighteen-minute intervals. Not that there was anything wrong with that; what was bad was that henceforth two senior officers were stationed by the launch ramp, where they ruthlessly confiscated anything in a pilot’s possession—everything from windup birds (of both the feeding and tweeting variety), butterflies, and bees, to various games of skill—in time, transforming the CO’s office into a storeroom for every conceivable sort of novelty. The Base cynics maintained that the CO always kept his door locked because he liked to play with his toys in private.

Given such obstacles, one is better able to appreciate the masterful cunning exercised by Pirx in smuggling aboard his AMU the little house with the three pigs. This despite the fact that, apart from a certain moral satisfaction, he derived little actual benefit from it. The patrol flight was grinding into its ninth consecutive hour. “Grinding” was precisely the word for it. Pirx was reclining in his contour couch, all bound and belted in, mummylike, with only his arms and legs free, and his listless gaze fixed on the screens. For six weeks they had been flying in teams of two, at a distance of 300 kilometers, when Base Command decided to revert to its original tactic, leaving the sector deserted, clean as a whistle, so that even one patrolship was one too many. But just so there wouldn’t be any stellar “holes” on the maps, the solo flights were resumed. Pirx’s was the eighteenth mission to be flown after the team flights were scrubbed.