“I can see serious objections to each one of them, sir. The trip across from Alpha Centauri is no afternoon excursion; it’s feasible only if the little beasts have a much longer life-span than ourselves, or can put themselves into a state of suspended animation. And even if one of these things is true, why do they bother? What do they hope to get out of it?”

“What about the Neptune or Saturn theory?”

“Their ships aren’t able to lift off a high-gravity planet, that’s certain—of course our own scouts can’t take off from Earth either, I know, but even so in our case the gravitational difficulties are not insuperable.”

“And what d’you think of the mother ship idea?”

“Well, I see it this way—there’s a whole race of Jackoes somewhere, living and eating and sleeping and breeding. They build a lot of ships, or at any rate they service and repair and maintain a lot of ships; all that amount of life and activity can’t possibly be explained by the mother ship theory. No ship, however large, could carry that amount of life.”

“All quite sound reasoning,” Admiral Dickenson agreed. “And to tell you the truth, not one of us has any better ideas on the subject than you have. But we’re going to find out.”

“Yes, sir?” Jason asked politely.

“Here’s how we’re going to do it. Somebody, yourself if you choose to volunteer, is going to take this ship out to the asteroids in company with a squadron of our own ships. Sooner or later out there you’ll meet up with a pack of Jackoes—do I have to tell you any more?”

“I get the idea now all right,” Jason agreed. “In the mix-up our imitation Jacko ship attaches itself to the Jacko squadron and goes along home with them. But I can see a lot of difficulties.”

“I’d like to know what difficulties you see.”

Jason had no inhibitions, no shyness; he was able to speak calmly and frankly even to high senior officers.