The Impossible Pirate — Themes and Context

Jeffries was an excellent officer. He was loyal, ambitious, and zealous. Cases assigned to him came in after a reasonable length of time, and they were sealed shut and glued down with all the necessary evidence. Those cases that were not to go to court, complete, were those in which the criminal preferred to shoot it out, and Lieutenant Jeffries was both brave and an excellent shot--as well as being a good strategist. He'd been working too hard, and as Edwards said, a real vacation would have been boring.

The will-o'-the-wisp known as Black Morgan, the Pirate, would give him a rest.

Jeffries went home to pack. Black Morgan was a space pirate and the place to look for him was in space. That space piracy was impossible for divers reasons seemed to make little difference to Black Morgan. He did it.

Lieutenant Jeffries made his plans, knowing the facts. First was to encounter Black Morgan. Theorizing how it would be possible to commit piracy on a ship traveling at twenty-five hundred miles per second, running at 3-Gs constant acceleration would do no good. It had been agreed impossible. Yet Black Morgan did it.

So Jeffries must first encounter the villain and then take after him. With but six months, Jeffries could not even begin to inspect the corners of the solar system that _hadn't_ been covered before.

But unlike straight hunting, in which the hunter must locate his quarry, when hunting rats, you bait rattraps and let the rat come to you.

Accordingly, Lieutenant Jeffries made a personal call to the Office of Shipping and requested confidential data on all shipments of high value, and then picked out the first. To add to the certainty, Jeffries called upon the editor of a sensation-seeking news agent and disclosed the fact that he, Lieutenant Jeffries, was being sent on the _Martian Queen_ to protect a shipment of radiosodium.

Then, when the time came, Lieutenant Jeffries went boldly to the space line terminal and embarked.

The first part of the trip was uneventful. At 3-Gs, the ship's velocity mounted swiftly as the hours passed under the constant acceleration. Jeffries watched the crew and the passengers idly, because all of them had been thoroughly investigated before the ship's take-off. They were citizens about which there could be no doubt, and therefore anything but a cursory watch was unnecessary. Jeffries divided his time between the passengers and the Chief Signal Officer, Jones, who willingly gave him whatever information he needed.

At one time, Lieutenant Jeffries asked Jones why space piracy was considered so impossible.

"You mean Black Morgan," smiled Jones. "Well, space piracy isn't impossible excepting the way he is supposed to do it. Piracy near either terminal might go off. But when we're rattling through space near mid-course at about two thousand miles per second, how could it be done?"

"Don't follow," objected Jeffries.

"First, 3-Gs is about all that people can stand over any long period. You can take five sitting down, and about eight lying on a pressure mattress, and I've heard of men taking fifteen while immersed in a pressure-pack that equals the specific gravity of the human body. But taking even 5-Gs for any length of time will kill. Even three is a strain for men who have been raised under one."

"Yes?" prompted Jeffries.

"It's the timing that would stop him," said Jones. "You can't possibly lie await in space until we come into detector range because detector range is about a million miles. At one thousand miles per second, that's offering you one thousand seconds from extreme range to zero range and another thousand from zero range to extreme range on the other side--on the way out. Two thousand seconds is about thirty-three minutes. To match our speed in that time would require an acceleration of about twenty-five hundred feet per second, which is approximately 75-Gs. Impossible! Plus the fact that he would have to lie in space within a million mile radius of our course."

"Supposing he picked up your trail close to Terra?"

Jones smiled. "If he could detect us, we'd detect him," laughed Jones.

"Supposing he had a better detector."

"We're at the theoretical limit of sensitivity now," said Jones. "And we've been there for years. The noise level, thermal agitation in the set itself, and a horde of other things limit the ultimate sensitivity of any detector. And don't mention noise-eliminators. They aren't. You can't stop electrons from rubbing one another and that's that!"

"We--as he may--also use both pulse-type detectors and aperiodic receivers. People would have known that he was following them."