being

pod's one seat

pod's one seat and the transparent hatch-dome lowered over him. A tinny-voiced communicator in the pod said pod release would be in forty-five seconds. In another voice it answered itself: "Inner lock sealed, now pumping . . . Pumping complete. Outer lock opening."
Cargy gaped and gasped as the open lock revealed a rectangle of stars and the bright horizon-bands of Merga. It was more of a sight than his Mead-memories had led him to expect.
Then suddenly the pod's closrems came to life, and he was through the lock and dropping away from the big ship. Voices on the communicator told him the ship was once more on its way to Princon.
With the spaceship no longer to be reckoned with, Cargy went into action.
There were no manual controls within his reach, these components having been removed when the pod was being readied for this descent. There was not even an emergency override of the pod's flight computer.
There was, however, the mounting panel from which the manuals had been removed, and it was perforated by a dozen plug holes. Ordinarily, these holes would offer no possibilities to a pod passenger. But Cargy spent most of his time in the Mergan wilderness, and he was never without his defense batteries, worn like curving plates along his belt.
Being in plain sight as they were, and also being so standard an item of apparel on Merga, the batteries hadn't attracted a glance, much less a thought, from the spaceship's officers and crew.
Now Cargy unsnapped his safety harness and got busy. Setting his batteries on parallel for low voltage, he rammed his electroprobes into a couple of plug holes and listened with satisfaction as the closrems' roar took on a lower pitch. He was feeding a counter-current into the driver power supply. This would cause the pod to lose orbital velocity more slowly and carry him past Port City. He could have plugged in the other way and dropped out of orbit more swiftly, but that would have plunked him in the ocean instead of on land.
A good two minutes passed before the communicator yapped: "Scramble rescue squad! Autopod is overshooting! Scramble rescue squad! . . . Damnit, rescue squad! Respond!" Cargy recognized the voice as that of a Port City Control Tower supervisor.
"Uh, this is Horax. The others are at supper."
"What the hell do you mean, at supper? They eat in the squad room!"
"Well, you see, tower, there ain't never much to do, and there's this cafe just across the