That, he felt, would let the Universe know that he was still out there, drifting. The ragged codes might even cause them to hasten because they might believe him to be alone, or without the help of the pilot who probably knew code well.
The meter hit the red line.
Charles Andrews snapped the goggle switch up and down, then up-pause-down. He waited a second, then made it up-pause-down, then up-down. He started the 'D' but his faltering hand flipped the second dot in a jittery fashion.
Down in the guts of the infrawave transmitter was a code wheel, supposed to turn completely around for one revolution. Along the periphery of the wheel was a series of serrations, which in passing a fast-action switch keyed the output of the simple transmitter, sending the stylized code. The jittery flipping of the main switch coincided with one of the serrations on the code wheel so that Andrews turned off the whole gear just as the transmitter was keyed on. The power normally used for the energizing section, stored in local capacitor banks, discharged through the output section.
It was not spectacular. The meter just flopped back to zero, a fuse blew, and the cabin was filled with the pungent odor of burned insulation.
Below, in the pedal generator saddle, Jock Norton felt the load bucking, then it went off completely and reflex almost threw the pilot out of his seat. The pedals pumped with no resistance. He went aloft.
"What happened?" he asked.
He sniffed at the air as Andrews pointed to the meter.
"It shouldn't happen," said Norton. "What made the thing buck, Andrews?"
Andrews was not the kind of man who hides his errors, at least. He faced Norton and said, "I was keying the transmitter."
Norton growled, "Did it ever occur to you that if this gizmo could be keyed, it would have been made that way in the first place?"
"No. I assumed that the thing was made to be handled by people not familiar with code, and that if one knew code one could key it."
Norton growled again, "Ever think that I know code, and that if it could have been keyed, I'd have done it before this?"
"Now that you say it, I suppose you would have. But what do we do now?"
"We try to repair it," snapped Norton. "Do you want to try it all by yourself, or will you permit me to help?"
Alice got between them once more. "Get it fixed first," she said sensibly. "Then argue about it afterwards."
Norton nodded, but he was not happy about it.
VIII
It was finished.
Commodore Theodore Wilson eyed the stereo grid with distaste. The filmy white haze, marking off the volumes already combed, filled the grid completely and overlapped the enclosing lines.
The pattern search had been most thorough. The random search teams had cut curlicues and looping curves back and forth through the grid. Their coverage had not been perfect, by far, but it was good enough for a random search. The volume covered by the infrawave detector spacer was spotty, but adequate.
The equipment was still breaking down every five or ten minutes, still delivering a horde of spurious responses. Scoutships still were being sent scurrying back and forth to investigate.
He faced the grid unhappily. He was gaunt from lack of sleep, from hastily snatched meals, or meals missed completely, from chain smoking, from watching what had started as a chance to make a good mark turn into drab failure. Worse, a failure that in no man's mind could be blamed upon Ted Wilson. For he had found one lifeship, and the fluke would be forgotten.
So would his failure. By every man but Wilson.
Somewhere back in that vast black volume of nothing, outlined by imperfect mathematical concepts in a larger field of nothing, was a lifeship, lost. A tiny cold mote of iron twenty-odd feet tall and nine feet in diameter across its widest point.
Wilson tried to draw his mind from it, but could not. Hysteria crept in but was quickly subdued.
In his mind he saw her as he had last seen her, pert and happy, with her light spacebag on the floor of the waiting room beside her slender ankles. He saw her before him, taut with thrill and excitement, vibrant and alive. He remembered her parting kiss, and the warmth of her body pressed against him.
Alice had been filled with anticipation, wanting to share her excitement with him, but unable to share what was a brand-new experience to her of going to space with a man who had been a-spacing for years. A man who knew all too well how space could be boring, lonely, and incredibly monotonous.
Not like travel across land, where there is scenery to watch, and although a tree is a tree, no two trees are ever alike, just as no one mountain ever looks the same at two o'clock in the morning as it had four hours earlier at ten in the evening.
Not even like travel on water, across the broad ocean where the scenery is water, whipped into waves of some similarity. For no two waves are ever the same exactly, and there is always the chance of a whitecap or a surfacing fish. The motion of the waves is incessant, at some times as soothing to the nerves as a lullaby.
But space was always the same. Across the galactic reaches covered by Man so far, there is little change in the aspect of the sky. A nearby star here or there is misplaced, but by and large the sky looks the same from Terra as it does from any planet or any star within fifty light years.
Move a man from Sol to Sirius, and Canis Major loses a bright star and changes shape to a degree not noticed by any but a trained uranographer. Ophiuchus gains another unimportant star that no one would care much about.
But then, Alice had been thrilled from the center of her heart to the flush on her skin with the idea of taking to space at last, so that she could at least begin to grasp the immensity and the mystery that he had failed to bring to her through talk.
Well, Alice Hemingway was getting her young tummy full of space!
He was still swearing under his breath when the men came in to ask him what they should do next.
He eyed them sourly. Manning, Edwards and Wainwright of his own ship. Hatch, Weston, Allison; then others Wilson knew only by reputation and name—Morganstern, Cunningham, Wilkes, Thordarson, Moore, Silkowski, Themes, and Calcaterra.
They watched him quietly, knowing what he must be feeling. They wanted orders, either to continue this fruitless search or to abandon it. But not one of them wanted to be the first to speak.
Finally Wilson singled out Toby Manning, the computer.
"Well?" he snapped.
Manning shrugged. "Tell me what to do next and I'll do it," he said defensively.
Wilson exploded, "You know your job! Suppose you tell us all how three hundred ships could comb space and miss anything bigger than a hard-boiled egg."
Toby Manning started to open his mouth to say something. He was not at all sure what he should say, not at all sure what was wise to say, but he knew he was expected to say something. It was as well for Manning that he felt indecision, for if he had uttered a syllable it would have been blasted back down his throat.
"Space search!" roared Wilson angrily. "Integrated maneuvers! We might as well be a bunch of crying children, lost, and scrambling all over a department store trying to get ourselves located. Sure I know there are indeterminates. I know there's always trouble with space coordinates. Sure, it ain't like plowing a farm where you can follow the edge of where you've been last. But you, Manning, are supposed to be a computer, capable of plowing with the Law of Probabilities which, my math prof once told me, should include the probability that human beings will make errors and be generally sloppy. You set up the search grid and proposed the search pattern with what you called a factor of overlap-safety."
Wilson turned on Hugh Weston. "And you are supposed to have a bunch of the finest astrogators in the Universe! You and your collection of schoolboys, confidently walking behind the stereo and drawing pinpoints and hairlines to show where we've been! Nuts. You should have used a ten-inch kalsomine brush."
He paused for breath as he scorned them with his eyes, then picked Allison.
"That fancy doodad of yours, Allison—the famous infrawave detector and ranger! Did you ever get more than ten minutes of constant operation out of it?"
"Once," Allison snapped angrily, his face red and his hands opening and closing.
"Fine," sneered Wilson. "Oh, fine. Oh, hell!"
He looked at them all again. He saw them, this time.
"All right," he said contritely. "I've been off base. I'm wrong. Manning, what are the probabilities for error in the grid itself?"
"Commodore, nothing can be perfect. We had to approximate their position, we had to guess their speed. But we did put our search area out beyond the region where their chances ended. If they do lie outside of the volume of space searched, their position lies under a nine-nines figure against the computation. I may sound like I'm talking gibberish, but that's it. No man can make a perfect sampling cross section unless he samples every item. I would stake my uniform on the probability that the lifeship lies within the volume outlined on our grid."
"Yes." Wilson nodded. "Weston, can you add anything? I chewed you out, too, and now I want to back down and ask your honest opinion."
Hugh Weston shrugged. "We're far from perfect ourselves," he said quietly. "I'll put it this way. I gave strict orders to the men in the marker ships that if there was any remote chance they might drift, they were to overcompensate. In other words, running a channel through space back and forth leaves a man lost himself, as to his exact position. I had men marking the courses. Each run through the grid covered a cylindrical volume. If there were a chance for any cylindrical coverage to miss its neighbor, leaving a hole in the grid, my men were to move in and see to it that these errata were closed. But I repeat, we're not perfect."
Wilson said contritely, "Allison, I owe you the most. You snapped me out of it. Maybe I owe you the least for bringing that damned gizmo out here and tying up Hatch's entire fleet of scout craft. But Hatch would have been sitting quiet anyway, as it turned out. Anything to add?"
"Nope," said Allison, with a shake of his head. "We know the infrawave detector is no polished instrument. We're fumbling in the dark. But there was that possible chance that the detector might have worked in deep space where it hadn't worked in the interference field of a planetary system. We hardly know what makes the infrawaves radiate, let alone how they propagate. But we tried. Just as you tried. We failed."
"Just as I failed," said Wilson bitterly.
"Not completely," said Commander Hatch. "We did catch one of them."
"Batting fifty per cent. One hit and one miss."
"Stop beating yourself, Wilson."
"Beating myself? I—" He stopped, then spoke to Manning. "What are their chances of being in the same general region as that other lifeship?"
Manning said to Weston, "You answer that."
Weston shook his head. "We have no way of knowing whether the rescued ship left the foundered spacecraft before or after the lost one. Nor at what celestial angle. Nor at what speed. Okay?"
Manning nodded, then added to Wilson, "The answer to that, Commodore, is that the position of the rescued lifeship has no bearing on the lost one. Just as the turn of heads in a toss has any effect upon the turn of the next toss."
Wilson nodded unhappily. "And so we sit here and talk it to death."
"What more can we do?"
"We can start over again."
"Is that an order?" asked Hatch.
Manning shook his head almost imperceptibly. Wilson caught the faint objection and said, "Wait a moment. Toby, what have you got in mind?"
"If we start over again," Manning said soberly, "I'll have to reconstruct the grid. Because by the time we've covered the grid, they'll have had time to pass outside of the present realm."
Wilson thought this over. "Why," he asked generally, "don't we start on the outside and close in?"
Manning answered, "Because in starting on the inside we have the best mathematical chance of finding them. By starting on the outside, we must cover a vast cylinder, element by element, working in the direction opposite to theirs. No, that's not the right way to do it, Commodore."
"All right. Reconstruct your new grid, Toby. Hugh, get your gang together and compute the center line of the pattern within a half-inch. Morganstern, you've got a good crew of advanced techs. Turn 'em all over to Allison. Allison, pack enough men aboard that cranky crate of yours so that any part that blows can be replaced within ten seconds. I want uninterrupted operation, even though the thing only hands us spurious responses.
"Hatch, put half of your gang in with the random search team. No use using all of you to run down gas clouds and meteorites and places where there should be something the size of a planet but isn't. Yes, we'll start all over. And this time, Hugh, give us fifty per cent overlap, and get busy with Toby to compute the new grid on that basis. Can we do it?"
They looked at him. Some wearily, who saw him more weary than they. Some angrily, but Wilson was beyond honest anger himself. Some anxiously, who knew that Ted Wilson had lost more out in that black nothingness than a reputation, or a mark on his record. Some looked at him willingly. They were all with him, tired, angry, expectant, but all willing.
Weston growled, "We'll find 'em, damn it."
The room rumbled with growls. They were not schoolboys, thrilled with the adventure or given to demonstration, nor youths driven to the job of combing the unknown for their commodore's lost love. But they felt it inside and stifled it in low-voiced growls because they were not much given to bragging, either.
And Ted Wilson knew that if the lost lifeship was to be found, his command would find it.
Wilson's communications officer came in quietly. He caught his commodore's eye and motioned Wilson aside.
"Commodore," he said, "something I'm not quite sure about."
"Yes?"
"The hourly infrawave distress call?"
"Yes, of course. It's time for it." Wilson looked at the man's face and knew that something was wrong. "It came in, didn't it?" When the communications officer didn't speak, Wilson cried hoarsely, "It came in?"
The com-tech nodded slowly. "It started, but it was sputtering badly. Then it conked out cold, Commodore. Nothing like I've ever heard before."
"Like what?"
"Well, you know the code wheel runs in standard communications code, giving the spacecraft license, the lifeship number, and the general distress call, repeated over and over for three minutes. Well, sir, the license identification came through all right, but after that the code got awful garbled and spotty, and then the whole damned transmission just crapped out, sir. After about a half-minute."
"Fade?" asked Wilson in a strained voice.
"Went out like a blown fuse. Big blast, then silence. Nothing."
Wilson thought for a moment, then looked around. "Anybody have an idea?"
Allison scratched his head. "You say the code was all right, but then got spotty?"
"Yes, sir."
Allison looked at Manning. Both were involved in science to a high degree, Allison as an infrawave researcher; Manning as a computer. Both had studied the mathematics of communication. Manning nodded soberly.
"You don't suppose they foolishly tried to key the automatic transmitter?" he asked. "Superimposing a code upon another code would result in a spotty transmission, since the intermingled transmission bits would obtain only where both codings delivered a positive configuration. It might—"
The communications tech broke in scornfully, "The pilot of the Seventy-nine was aboard. He'd know. Nobody but a complete imbecile would try to key an automatic distress transmitter."
Allison nodded positively. "Can't be it."
Commander Hatch looked down at his feet. "I was in a space can once," he said. "They don't last forever. I—" He let his voice trail away.
Wilson looked into their faces. The cold, bleak fact was so clear in their faces that he could not ignore it. He was forced to recognize the fact that a lifeship is no spacecraft. A lifeship is a flimsy tin can, as spaceworthy as an open raft on the broad ocean, as spaceworthy as an umbrella in a windstorm. A lifeship was not intended for comfort, or for travel, or for use. It was aimed at a hope and a prayer that if the mother spacecraft came a cropper that human lives could be protected for a time, long enough to give hope of rescue.
In the faces of the men had been determination. Now the determination had faded. Left was only sorrow and resignation.
Wilson had lost.
Doggedly he said, "We'll loaf it out for the next hour. We'll go on as though this hadn't happened. We'll prepare for a recoverage of the grid."
They all nodded and left, but the step of each had lost its spring, and voices had lowered to funeral rumbles. Some even whispered.
Commodore Wilson swore at the closed door.
The hour passed with the slow interminable drag of eternity itself. It was the complete uncertainty of the result, the angering fact that not a single thing could be done until that hour had passed, and even then there was a high possibility that nothing could be done at all. So long as the hourly signal came in, there had been solid knowledge of the survival of the lost party.
This had been a sort of haphazard thing. There had been times before when a lifeship party had missed sending the signal because of fatigue, and had finally sent their signal late. Suggestions were always cropping up that the signal be entirely automatic, clock-timed. These ideas were claimed to be impractical since a timed, automatic signal only meant that the lifeship itself was still lost in space, and not that any aboard it were alive.
A full, two-way infrawave system would have been the answer; if a full two-way system could have been installed in a lifeship, still leaving room in the little space can for things essential to the sustenance of human life.
Ocean lifecraft are equipped with hooks and lines for catching fish, with gizmos for making water from the salt ocean drinkable. Air is free. Waste products are cast overboard.
In space there are no fish to catch, no salt ocean to purify, no air but that within the tiny can and its high-pressure air flasks. There is a supply of water and a small refining plant to distill waste products, not at all efficient, but adequate for a few days. But the bulk of the food and water and all of the air necessary to maintain life filled up a large percentage of the small volume of a lifeship.
Slowly, that nerve-grinding hour passed, and then it became an hour and a half. Then it was two hours, then two and a half. Then three hours.
No signal....
Andrews looked askance at Norton. "Nothing we can do?" he asked quietly.
Norton shook his head: "Nothing I can do," he said helplessly.
"But there must be something."
"There probably is," Norton said simply. "If I were a trained com-tech, I could probably fake something together and make some fudged-up repair that would at least radiate. But I'm a pilot, so I don't know all the angles of infrawave equipment. Not even basic theory. I know enough—with the aid of this repair manual—to replace any part that might have failed. But beyond that—"
Andrews shook his head and scratched his nose. "I can't see it," he said.
"See what?"
"I can't see how a man can claim the ability to make a repair on a complicated thing like this without knowing more than you say you know."
Norton smiled thinly. "I can replace the plumbing under a sink, too," he said flatly, "without knowing enough to make me a licensed plumber. This manual gives full directions, but no reasons. If the voltage at this terminal is less than thirty-six hundred, then check the voltages on terminals so-and-so, measure the resistance between terminals this-and-that with the equipment off, connect terminal A to terminal B, and check the alternating voltage across Component Two-nineteen. Depending upon what we find that does not follow the book, we locate the busted doodad and replace it. But the damned book doesn't bother to tell you why the voltage across such-and-such terminals should be thirty-six hundred, or what happens when it isn't. The book was not written for infrawave engineers. It was written for guys like me who care more to get a signal on the infrawave bands than we care for the theory of operation."
"All right, then. So we blew something. Can't we run it down?"
"Trouble is that we blew too many things at the same time."
"Don't understand."
"Naturally," snapped the pilot. "You know less about this stuff than I do. This is supposed to be more than thirty-six hundred, providing that is functioning. But the voltage will go above seven thousand if the other has come unglued. If you blow both items, together, the voltage downed by one and upped by the other comes out to about four thousand. The reading may be all right, but when everything in the damned set reads wrong, I have to give up."
"So what do we do now?"
Norton shrugged. "We hope they don't give up. We keep on working on this thing. We—Hell, we might as well turn on the receiver and listen."
"Can we spare the power?"
Norton looked at the financier. "Might as well," he said. "We might as well. If they abandon this search because we aren't transmitting, we might as well waste the power anyway...."
Viggon Sarri faced his lieutenants. "From Brein's report," he announced, "they finished their grid search some three hours ago, and have been milling around in stacked pattern ever since. Linus predicts that they have been waiting for a recurrence of the regularly transmitted signal that should have kept coming but which blew out from some sort of overload. Within the half-hour, they have reformed their search pattern and seem inclined to continue, even though it should appear obvious to them that their friends have lost their ability to transmit."
Regin Naylo looked puzzled. "Could it be that they've discovered how to tell when an infrawave receiver is being used?"
Faren Twill shook his head, "If they knew that they'd have developed a more efficient infrawave detector."
Linus Brein agreed vigorously.
Viggon Sarri seated himself self-confidently. "Gentlemen, you have before you a race with dogged determination, the grit and will to go on, even though they have tasted failure."
"Right," said Faren Twill.
"So now I know," said Viggon. "And now we go in!"
Regin Naylo looked hopeful. "To let 'em have it?" His face fell. "Or to make friends of them?"
Faren Twill started to speak, but Viggon silenced him with a wave of his multiflexed hand as he went on. "We go in prepared for anything. Naylo, you will, as usual, set up our forces for battle. That means an all-man alert at all stations. Complete alert, Naylo."
Naylo nodded.
"With one exception. No attempt to clear the space charge in the projectors with a preliminary blast."
"But look, sir—"
"You'll issue instructions to your beam officers to set their beams for the trial blast, but not to clear them."
"Mightn't that be dangerous?"
"It might. But the clearing blast can come before we strike—if we have to strike. I doubt that the wait will be disastrous, Regin. After all, they seem to have no armaments worthy of the name. And firing a few thousand megnoid beams, even at test power, cuts up some awful didoes in space."
"So?" sneered Naylo.
"Aside from scaring the armor off of them, it also kills a certain element I demand. At any rate, those are your orders. You, Faren Twill, will take charge of the maneuvers, setting up the fleet in battle formation and instructing each ship captain to be prepared for any maneuver, however unorthodox. Both of you are to maintain constant personal contact with me, for my orders may change by the minute. Linus, you had better clear your logic computer of all problems, but retain the information we have stored regarding this race. Be prepared to accept any information that may come from our next act. Understand?"
They all nodded.
"All right. Then as soon as each of you is ready for further orders, report. At that time we are going in!"
IX
Eyes on the speaker grille as if they could force it into life by the power of their minds and attention, they sat in the little lifeship cabin in deathly silence. Their utter helplessness was apparent to all three of them, but their grasp of that fact took different trends.
Charles Andrews was angry and frightened. Had he been able to transmit his blocked-off communication he would have roared in anger, cajoled, threatened, accused the rest of the Universe of incompetency, then offered large rewards. But perhaps for the first time in his life Charles Andrews was in the awkward position of having no channel of communication with those who might do his bidding. Therefore he was as frightened as a musician who is told he must lose his hands, the use of which give him his only opportunity to pour out his inner feelings.
Jock Norton was stunned. Because he had looked upon this affair as a sort of lark. Others had come through spacewreck safely and he should, too. Because now he had been forced to realize that this incredible thing was happening to him. Juggernaut was about to roll over him, and there was nothing he could do about it.
A couple of the others who had come through safely had gained some fame and fortune by writing their memoirs, and taking their short strut upon the stage of Public Curiosity. But the game had turned bitter, and now Jock Norton was wondering if it might not be better to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible—except that Jock Norton was afraid to face death with the same calm, casual attitude with which he had always faced life. But life had been fun, while death.... Who knew?
Alice Hemingway was frightened almost into shock. She was holding fast to a blind hope, the same hope to which many a shipwrecked and space-wrecked victim has clung when the searching party passes at a distance and goes on, and the mind keeps crying that surely someone will turn and see. And screams become hoarse because all reason and logic have fled, and there is no way for the mind to realize that no voice could be heard across the thunder of waves or across the gulf of space.
Alice also had blind faith in her lover. He could not fail; he would not permit himself to fail. She would not face the possibility that though Ted Wilson would do his best, that his fine crew, and the equally fine crews of the other commanders would do their best, that best was not enough.
So far, no one had mentioned the fact that Charles Andrews had wrecked their code transmitter. One does not kick a dog for ignorance, nor lay blame for technical incompetence upon a financier. An error is an error, and the other two victims knew that Andrews felt the weight of the error he had made as heavily as they did. But there it was, and sooner or later it would probably break through, and come out stark and vital.
Then the infrawave receiver chattered into life.
"All right," said the voice of Commodore Wilson. "We have our plans. We'll assume that they've had a technical breakdown and cannot transmit. But until we find that lost lifeship, and the three of them in it, dead or alive, we'll keep on combing space! Are you with me?"
The infrawave yammered with a chorus of affirmatives.
Andrews took a deep breath.
Norton relaxed and lit a cigarette.
Alice looked around the cabin wildly and cried, "Ted—Ted! You can't fail us now!"
They sat there in their little lifeship cabin, cold and frightened, and they listened to the chatter going on across space from ship to ship and an occasional call to Base. Hope waxed and waned; they were as lost as any human being has ever been lost.
Yet somewhere out there men were searching for them. They could be light years distant; they might even be going in the other direction. But it could be just the minute after the next when a wild happy yell would burst from the infrawave receiver to inform the known Universe that the lost had been found!
And so they waited—and hoped....
Commander Hatch, tired of inactivity, was loafing along out deep in space on the trail of a clustered group of the infrawave detector's improbable findings. But this time it was not a spurious response he got.
He flicked past Viggon Sarri's flagship at no more than a half-mile distance and blinked at what he saw, hoping to scan it more closely on the image that his eye retained. The big flagship had come out of the black in a flash and a fluid line of sparkling lights, had blasted into size, and had been behind him in another flick. It left only that flowing image on Hatch's retina, but that was enough.
"That," he said aloud in his one-man ship, "was a spacecraft! Andbig!"
Hatch flipped his flitter end for end and set the blast. It brought him to a slowdown by the time he came abreast of the second wave of Viggon Sarri's space force.
To one side was a monster, sleek and dangerous-looking, its turrets flat and ugly-snouted. Above him was another, more distant, but no less angry-looking. Before him was a fighter carrier, its skeleton deckworks crammed with fleet hornets of space, their stinger fixed forward, looking out of the carrier at every angle.
Small, ineffective drive flares indicated that their crews were alert, though idling, and that their working guts were hot and ready to arrow into space. Before him was another of the vast battle wagons, its projector snouts uncovered. One of the turrets made a swift turn, a lift of the projectors, a lowering and complete swivel. Then another started the warm-up maneuver.
Hatch's scoutcraft passed on. On through the front line of ultra-heavies to the lighter, faster classes of spacecraft behind the front array. Jaw slack, he pressed his eyes against the binocular scope, straining to see the flat-extent of each formation. But they faded off into the depths of space and he could not see the end of them.
He passed another carrier and watched the first flight of fighters whip out from the skeleton deck in a flat circle, to turn upward along the axis of the carrier and disappear forward toward the spearhead of the force. They looped around after awhile and came back to the carrier after their test flight.
Everywhere Hatch saw the ugly snouts of projectors lifting and turning in their turrets.
He broke out in a cold sweat. Hatch was as frightened a man as ever existed.
He was a commander in the Space Force, a body trained for combat. But the Space Force, for obvious reasons, was not trained in combat. Aside from having to contend with an attempt at space piracy, some more frequent attempts at barratry, theft, and other forms of skullduggery, and very frequent smuggling, the Space Force was not armed against opposition.
They had their arms, and their ships were efficient. But for the lack of an active enemy, the Space Force was not a pampered service, handed money for the development of heavy space ordnance. There had always been the unexpected "Maybe, some day," but to date no one had ever come up with any proof that Humankind did not represent the only sentient animal in the aggregation of Galaxies.
So Hatch, trained to run down fragmentary piracies and an occasional run-in with some spaceman whose operations exuded an odor into space, was no more trained to space combat than any of his fellows. He had exercises, but had never heard a shot fired in wartime anger.
So Hatch sweated it out.
He flipped off his drive so that he would not be seen. His hand trembled, halfway to the microphone of his infrawave. He stopped it, lest he be heard.
Flipping off his drive was good for another reason too, he told his quaking mind. It also kept up his speed instead of decelerating to a dead stop in the middle of this incomprehensible, magnificent, dangerous-looking fleet of space battle-craft.
Personal safety, and the hope of—
Hatch laughed at himself sourly. He was in space, not hiding behind a tree on a battlefield-to-be. He was floating out there in the openest open that had ever been opened, where it was definitely true that if he could see them, they could see him. Trying to hide in the middle of that task force was like a man as masculine as he was, trying to troll unnoticed through a mass meeting of the Gamma Upsilon Mu—better known as the "Get Your Man" sorority.
Besides, other men were back there in space that must be warned. Probably he had already been noticed, and zeroed-in from a few of the smaller projectors in that task force. They would hardly let him pass through the fleet and go free. They might not blow him out of space until the last moment, to preserve their element of surprise. But the men back there—
He reached for the microphone, took a deep breath, and offered up a brief prayer to get his lines through before the blast came. And that the blast be a quick and merciful blackout instead of a slow and painful matter of dying all alone, deep in space....
Wilson was striding up and down the stereo room when the loud-speaker on the wall bellowed into a strained roar:
"Commander Hatch to Commodore Wilson on emergency priority!"
The entire personnel of the plotting room froze solid.
"Wilson! I've just contacted a fleet of warcraft, big ships with nasty-looking projector sort of things looking out of mobile turrets. There are big ones! Bigger than anything we've ever built, and skeletonlike things that have open decks loaded with one-man fighters. They're—"....
Viggon Sarri said crisply, "Get him! Alive!"
Regin Naylo barked crisp orders, and some of the ships took off to surround the small Earth scout craft. One of the big cruiser class swerved over and hurled out a blanketing infrawave that quietly clamped down on space and shut off Hatch's transmission as abruptly as cutting the wires on a telephone line. Except that there was not even a click....
Wilson grabbed a phone and barked, "Froman! You're Hatch's second. Scout that! And report constantly!"
"Affirm, Commodore!"
Wilson called Admiral Stone. "Trouble, Admiral," he snapped curtly. "We've contacted what appears to be a war fleet in space."
Admiral Stone was dumbfounded. Like many others, he realized that the mathematical probabilities of there being another sentient race in the Galaxy was almost a certainty, that considering the billions of stars, the figures read to the tune of probably some twenty thousand such planetary races, even taking the probabilities in a pessimistic quantity.
But twenty thousand sentient races sprinkled across a volume of space with the infinity of the Galaxy gave each and every one of them a lot of room. Their making contact with one another was slightly less probable than the close passage of two stars.
Then the men of Earth waited again.
They realized that nothing is ever done right in a hurry. Light leagues of space separated the human forces from the alien. Light years had to be crossed. As time passed, everybody sat tense, each with his own personal thoughts.
An alien race? Certainly everybody expected that Humankind would some day meet up with some stellar race distant and remote and probably as exotic-looking as anything that the most lurid magazines had ever used on their covers. Or possibly they would be human-looking. Each man had his own ideas, and no two were exactly alike. The aliens would come as friends. They would be met as friends. They would come as superiors to help them to reach Utopia, or come as masters to make them slaves. They were humanivorous—or they were good to eat themselves. And what might happen to an intelligent filet mignon?
And so the time passed slowly until Hatch's second, Major Spaceman Froman, and his scouts made contact.
They were wide spread as they came against that space lattice of Viggon Sarri's first wave. Their reports were sketchy and incomplete, because they had been ordered to make contact, to observe, and to swoop back. In snatches they described the fleet:
"Thousand feet long—"
"Five hundred in diameter—"
"Twelve turrets—"
"With four projectors each."
"Two forward and—"
"Two at spread behind."
"Carriers—"
"Why haven't we got carriers?"
"Fighters with fixed—"
"Hundreds of them!"
Stone heard, and digested the ramble of information. He heard things described that he could not believe, and things that he had to accept.
"Wilson!" he barked. "Retreat! Retire."
"But look, Admiral—"
Admiral Stone took a deep breath and fought his dazzled mind into a semblance of order.
"Commodore Wilson," he snapped crisply, "official orders. You are to abandon this search. At once."
"But do you realize—"
"Stop it, Commodore Wilson!! I am well aware of the fact that there are three human lives at stake. But under these circumstances I cannot permit three thousand lives to remain in jeopardy on the scant chance that three may be saved. You are ordered to abandon the search and return to base."
"Admiral, I—"
"I sit here arguing with you, Wilson, because I don't want to take punitive measures. But please understand that you are facing a battle fleet of unknown strength and unknown fire power, both factors of which must certainly be greater than any power or number we can put in the field. You cannot face them, Wilson! Your space rifles are stowed and your ammunition holds are empty. Your torpedo bays are stocked with a few scattered practice missiles with smoke-flare warheads. Your fire-control equipment needs overhaul and adjustment, and your lockers are not checked out for battle maneuver. For the safety of your men, Wilson, and for the safety of your home, you must stop this senseless argument and obey your orders!"
"Sorry, Admiral, I—"
"This is mutiny!"
"I guess it is, but I am going to find—"
"You will transfer your command to Mr. Manning, who will take the temporary rank of Commodore Executive. You will consider yourself under arrest without confinement to quarters, and you will present yourself to my office upon your return."
"I will do nothing of the sort!"
"Then I must take punitive measures.... Attention, all squadron commanders and officers above the technical grade! Commodore Theodore Wilson is relieved of command, and you are to proceed on your own flight plans to your individual bases. This is by order of my office. I am Admiral Stone."
Toby Manning came in, and behind him were Edwards and Wainright. Wilson faced them angrily. "Well?" he snapped.
Manning looked uncomfortable, but said nothing.
"By Regs," said Wilson slowly, "I am still in the command of this squadron."
Toby Manning nodded slowly.
"I am refusing to obey orders. I amnotplacing my squadron in your command, Mr. Manning. Understand?"
Toby smiled crookedly. "I understand. You are accepting all responsibility, and you are telling me that if I do not follow your orders, I am disobeying a senior officer."
"Precisely."
Wainright said, "But look here, Ted, isn't that—"
Wilson's laugh was brittle. In it was no humor at all. "That is precisely right. Even though I am disobeying my senior officer, Mr. Manning will be disobeying his senior officer if he does not follow my orders."
"But isn't Admiral Stone senior to all of us?"
"Yes. But he is a distant senior to you. I am your immediate superior. And now, damn it, stop making like a space lawyer and let's start hunting!"
Wainright nodded, but as he turned to leave he was muttering:
"Wish we had more than the steak knives in the wardroom to fight with!"
X
Vacantly the three survivors of spacewreck, in the lost lifeship, stared at the grille of the infrawave receiver in the deadly silence that followed Admiral Stone's last transmission. This was the end of message, end of hope, end of them.
Jock Norton's toneless voice gritted, "That about rips it wide, doesn't it?"
Alice Hemingway's voice came out, weak and thin. "Ted—you tried. Now you'll—"
Andrews stood up quickly, and strode across the floor shakily. He faced the infrawave receiver with a mad glitter in his eye, and he roared:
"Damn you, come back! Damn you, come back!"
Over and over he roared the inane words, and as he roared, his anger and madness increased until he was beating a fist on the cabinet in a violent rage.
The infrawave said crisply, "Flight Squadron Nineteen in flight pattern for Procyon Four."
"No!" screamed Andrews.
"—time," continued the infrawave.
"No!" screamed Andrews again, beating the cabinet with both fists now.
"Ten!" said the infrawave, and Andrews came down on the cabinet with all of his wiry strength.
"Nine!" The beat became a rhythm with the call.
"Eight!" Another hard slam left blood marks on the metal.
"Seven!" The cabinet bent inward. A shower of glass fell from the tuning indicator.
"Six! Almost lost in a solid thunk.
"Five!" And after the blow something spluttered in the speaker's throat.
"Four!" Knobs bent, and Andrews' blood drooled along the cabinet front toward the deck.
"Three—" With a fizzling sound the infrawave died, and said no more.
Insanely the man beat upon the bent cabinet in the same rhythm although the sound had died. He beat and he beat until the stun and shock had been wiped out of Jock Norton's face. He came over and hauled Andrews from the cabinet. The financier struggled, but it was futile against Jock's size and strength and youth and stamina.
The pilot trapped Andrews' flailing arms and held him immobile until rage, madness and hysteria had passed. Andrews lay silent, his face blank, his breathing shallow.
Norton looked at Alice. "Stroke?" he asked worriedly. "Has he got a bad heart?"
Alice looked up, the semi-blankness fading from her face. "I—don't know. Is he—"
"He's passed out or burned out, or worked himself into a faint."
Alice brought a blanket as Norton lifted Andrews to one of the bunks. "Jock?" she asked.
"Yes?"
"What does this mean? Enemy ships and all that?"
"It ain't good, baby. From somewhere has come the inevitable transgalactic culture, only with guns instead of gifts."
"But it isn't like us to run."
He nodded soberly. "Yes, it is," he told her positively. "The first man lived to start the human race by knowing when to run like hell. He ran until he could pick up a handy rock to throw. That's what our men have done. Run home to get our rocks."
Alice looked wistful. "And Ted?"
Jock shrugged. "I wouldn't know," he said. "He'll probably get busted a few grades for insubordination. They took his command away. That's one way of preventing full insubordination from an officer who might have a lot of public sentiment on his side, or good high-rank material in him. They take away his commandbeforehe disobeys, slap him down a few steps for trying, and let him sweat it out."
"I'm glad," she said simply and her voice was calm.
Norton looked at her strangely.
She caught his look and smiled, almost serenely.
"It would be a shame," she said, "for Ted to have to lose his rank and his prestige and his honor, and maybe his life and the lives of all his men, by doggedly staying out here in the face of an enemy fleet, against orders."
Norton nodded dubiously. "I suppose so," he said. "But do you know where that leavesus?"
"Yes," she said, "I know."
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she leaned forward to find strength in his arms, and a rest for her weary head on his shoulder. He held her, gently stroking her hair with one hand and pressing her against him.
She stopped sobbing after awhile, and looked up at him. Murmuring softly, he leaned down and kissed her eyes. She clutched at him and swayed in his arms. He found her lips then, but there was no fire in them.
Nor was he surprised. For there was no fire in his own, either....
Viggon Sarri gloated, "Ver-ry interesting. Ver-ry."
Faren Twill shrugged. "Just what else did you expect?"
Regin Naylo scowled. "We had 'em in your lap," he complained. "And nobody gave the order to fire. We could have chased 'em inch by inch, but all we did was to hang here in space and scare the hull plates off of them and let 'em run like rabbits."
Viggon smiled. "Exactly. I expected one of two things. They could have swarmed into us senselessly, suicidally, to take whatever toll they could take before they lost. That's why we had the projectors alerted and the fighters hot. I don't even open an ant hill without protection, gentlemen. So they did the other thing."
"Sure," growled Regin Naylo. "They could either stay or run. Since they didn't stay, they—"
"Stop being smart," snapped Viggon Sarri. "Or weren't you listening?"
"Yes, I was."
"Then you should realize that what they were doing was behaving sensibly. Just what would you do, Naylo, if you were wandering through a woods unarmed and a large, unknown, and completely unexpected beast leaped out on your path?"
Naylo sneered. "I'd run."
"Then what?"
Naylo's eyes widened. He said at last, "I'd run until I got where I could get armed, then I'd probably go back hunting the beast."
"Exactly. But not too good an analogy, which is my fault. They did not run in abject terror. They sent scouts to spy us and report our strength as best they could. Then they retreated. There's a difference. Theyreportedhome, butretreatedto their base or bases, because they knew that they could do no good by hurling themselves on us."
"They want to arm themselves?"
"Precisely."
"And what do we do now?"
"I think we had best question the one we picked up."
Linus Brein shook his head. "Not that one," he said.
"Why not?"
"When we pried open his scoutcraft, he came out a-fighting and he fought until we had to take him over. He clipped several of our boys, and I'm afraid we got a little rough. Our fighting men can get hard, you know."
"Dead?" demanded Viggon.
"No. But he'll be in no condition for an extensive questioning for some time."
"Damn! Well, the next best thing to do is to collect the lifeship. We know what we wanted to know about their mass reaction. Now we must learn about their individual reaction to an awkward and dangerous situation."
Faren Twill picked up the microphone and ordered a flight of light destroyers into action....
Wilson sat in the dome room of the detector ship and cursed. The lights were still flickering across the presentation surface, flecks and streaks of spurious response. But with space cleared of the horde of searching spacecraft, the flickings and the streakings had diminished, although that cluster of spots still held its position.
Wilson said to Allison, "Seems to me we could have volunteered to stay out here and keep watch."
Allison was shaking his head when the dome went black again. "They wouldn't believe you," he said.
One of the techs readjusted something and the presentation returned.
"It's a damned funny business, this Space Service," said Wilson. "Any service, I guess."
"How so?" asked Manning.
"If I give a wrong order and you disobey, to keep from piling up, you get clipped for it. If you don't refuse to carry out the order and we pile up, I get busted—if any of us come back whole."
"I wonder iftheyhave that trouble, too," Wainright said musingly, looking up at the cluster of dots that represented the enemy fleet.
"Probably. I hope so."
Edwards shook his head. "I'd rather fight an enemy that had no iron-bound discipline. Let 'em run wild, taking their own ideas as they come. Let 'em argue with the skipper. Let 'em quit if their commander doesn't play their way. That's the difference between a mob and a service, Ted."
Wilson grinned. "Call it confusion then!" he said, with a wave at the dome. "And I hope they have it!"
As they watched, a group of dots moved from the group and started away, slowly, at an angle. They watched until the dots had progressed a few feet from the main cluster.
Ted Wilson eyed them intently. "There must be some reason.... Allison!"
"Yes?"
"See if you can project an imaginary line across that damn dome! I'll bet that our lifecraft lies somewhere along the course!"
Allison yelled, "Jones! Halligan!"
The dome blacked out with a puff of smoke from one bay. A tech groped deep in one of the open panels and went to work with long-handled tools. Someone called above the hubbub that they'd have it back in shape in a minute.
Wilson mumbled, "Sixteen thousand delicate infrawave parts, and a half-million electronics components, all balanced on the pinpoint of a page of equations rolled into a dunce's cap! And I have to live with it!"
Allison grumbled, "Hell, nothing is perfect the first time."
"All right, forget it." Wilson shrugged, as the dome flickered on again.
It made a flowing, over-and-over turn. Then the presentation spun around some one of its personal axes of no particular coordinate, like a planetarium being operated by a putterer who wants to see what happens when he pushes any button at random.
It settled down.
Jones and Halligan set up their sighting devices in the center of the big floor and began to project their line across the dome.
One of the techs came running up to Allison. "If we change the driver response threshold by seven ultrachronic levels—"
"Go away, Magill. Maybe tomorrow."
"But look—"
"You look. I said—"
A white-yellow circle appeared on the dome with a red line cross on it like a telescope reticule. Halligan was aiming a flashlight pointer at the dome and talking into the floor mike at the same time.
"Hey, Allison! Maybe that's it?"
In the circle was a pinpoint that came and went. It danced now and then, and it sloughed into flowing shapes as it merged with the rest of the flickering on the dome. It would have been lost in the ever-changing light pattern of the dome if there had been no reason to suspect it. The spot lay on a dead line across the dome from the course of the other spots.
"All right," Wilson said grimly. "We've got no more scouts to go look. Turn this crate head-on for that trace and we'll barrel!"
Slowly the presentation in the dome shifted. The almost lost spot rose until it was dead above.
"Pour on the coal!" yelled Wilson. "We've got to get there first!" He grabbed for the infrawave phone and cried, "Hello, out there! Lifeship Three, we've sighted you! We'll be with you in—" He glanced at Allison. "How far are they?"
Allison shook his head. "That's one of the limitations. We can detect, and display in solid angle azimuth, but we haven't got to the ranging yet."
Wilson said a few words that should never have gone out over the infrawave. Then he said into the phone, "Well, we've sighted you, anyway, and we'll be with you soon." And to Manning he said, "I hope to God they've got their receiver on...."
Linus Brein said, "I didn't catch part of that. New words for the files, I guess."
Viggon Sarri said, "Probably a few words of condemnation over the fact that their detector doesn't range."
"I'll catalogue them so."
"Do that. Maybe we can ask their specific meaning at some later date. But I'd not be inclined to bark those words at one of them to see what happens. It might happen. Linus, how do we stand with them?"
Linus consulted a chart. "They're a little closer to the life ship than we are. But we're faster."
"Faren, can't we get any more speed?"
Faren Twill shrugged. "We've a destroyer escort," he said. "If we don't mind leaving the destroyers behind."
"Pour it on," said Viggon Sarri sharply. "Then have the destroyers fan out in an intercept pattern just in case...."
"Cold," said Alice in a thin voice.
But it was not really cold; it was the giving up of all hope, the turning off of all will to live, that made her cold.
Norton cradled her in his arms and thought of how this would have been if they had been snug and warm a-planet, instead of lost and alone in space. Her slender body against him did not bring passion, but compassion. He stroked her head and tried to warm her shivering body.
Andrews still lay in a coma.
Jock Norton looked over Alice's shoulder at a wall cabinet. In that cabinet were some capsules that would bring a merciful end before the real suffering began. Andrews probably wouldn't need one. But maybe—maybe—
Slowly, as if doing something against his will, Norton disentangled Alice's arms. Gently, lest she stir and cry out in fear, he broke her hold on him and stroked her arms for a moment. He slipped his own arm out from beneath her neck and held her with his other arm for a second or two.
She was moaning faintly, staring at the ceiling and not really aware of what he was doing. He slipped off the bunk and walked across the room unsteadily.
Slowly he went, for the idea in his mind was against his determination. He cursed the ruined transmitter, and snarled under his breath at the broken receiver. Then he fiddled with the catch of the cabinet, his fingers obeying his subconscious, instead of his not too firm will.
He took two capsules from the bottle and went back to Alice with them in his hand. He had reached, was standing beside her, when he looked at his closed fist and decided to wait it out one more minute before he popped one into her mouth and took the other one himself.
For life, as poor and precarious as it was at this moment, and as likely as it was to get worse, was still better than taking that long, unknown and unpredictable step into the Long Dark.
His minute passed all too quickly.
Alice shuddered and pressed against him. "Ted," she pleaded weakly. "Ted—hold me."
"Yes, darling," he said softly. There was no point in hurting her any more. Let her think he was Ted, if that was the way she wanted it.
Andrews stirred, and groaned.
Norton looked at him, frowning thoughtfully. Maybe Andrews should have his easy out, too. It would be tough on the guy to come to, and find himself the only live one in the ship, and of course not know where to find the remedy.
The pilot decided to stall for another minute. He'd get another capsule and slip it to Andrews. Then he would hold Alice once more and keep her happy, thinking he was Ted.
"One moment more, honey," he breathed into her ear, then kissed it gently. "I've got to get you something."
"Hurry," she murmured.
Hurry? Yeah! Get it over with!
The trip across to the cabinet was longer this time, for the idea was still rubbing him the wrong way.
"Aw, hell!" he grunted, as he reached for the bottle again.
XI
As Commodore Theodore Wilson eyed the infrawave detector presentation on the dome of the detector ship, he groaned. The presentation of targets was stronger now. At the apex of the dome was the lifeship, its response waxing and waning, but always strong enough to stay visible even at its lowest ebb.
Some forty or fifty degrees down the hemisphere was the stronger response of the enemy warcraft, hanging motionless in the dome. The group of spacecraft that had come with it were dispersed in some complicated pattern. Most of these were lost in the tricky shift of the spurious lighting of the dome. Others had disappeared completely because they were out of range.
"Pilot!" cried Wilson. "Can't we pour on more power?"
The pilot rapped his levers with the heel of his hand and shook his head slowly. "Sorry, sir. We've been at the top of the military emergency range all along." Occasionally he looked back over his shoulder at the motionless enemy response in the dome.
No man in the detector room needed a fancy ranging detector and a computer to know the worst. The infrawave would not range, but it was good enough for this. The inefficient detector and knowledge of one of the simpler facts of navigation told the whole unhappy story.
When the angular position of a distant object remains constant to the observer in a moving vehicle, they are on collision course. And so long as that observed angle does not change, they will remain on that collision course, right up to the bump. Distance, or angle of attack does not contribute or detract. The fact remains.
The object may be stationary, or the observer may be stationary and the object moving, or both may be moving, but so long as that angle remains constant, they will collide. One may be curving and the other in acceleration or deceleration, but if the observed angle does not change, it's still collision.
In fact, there are only a couple of exceptions to this. One is when the subject object is astern and moving dead awayfroma collision, or what might have been one before either ship moved onto the course. The other is when a circle is cut with the object at dead center. Make it a spiral and you have your course of danger.
Put it in space, or on the sea, or in the air, or across the land, and the same holds true.
So the fact that the enemy warcraft hung at some forty or fifty degrees and did not change its position meant that the detector ship and the enemy warcraft were going to meet! And undoubtedly at the point where the lifeship would be in the middle because the enemy was obviously heading for that spot. When they hit, the enemy warcraft would come through the detector dome exactly where its response now registered.
"Can't we stretch something?" demanded Wilson.
Manning thought about it. "We'll bust something if we—"
"Then bust something!" barked Wilson.
Manning and Wainright took off below, while Ted watched the spot over his head. He tried to guess whether he was closer to the lifeship than the enemy, or whether it was the other way around. Not that it made any difference to the chase, but it did mean that he or the enemy was the faster of the two.
Wilson put his chips on the enemy. But until he had two sides of range to his included angle of forty-odd degrees, no one could tell.
Then the spot moved down a bare trifle, faltered, and continued to flow slowly back toward the rim of the dome.
Wilson gave a howl of victory just as the infrawave detector conked out again. The crew scurried madly to repair the fault. He was still looking glumly at the blank dome when the infrawave phone rang beside him.
"Wilson!" he barked in it angrily.
"Wilson, I'm pleading with you to use some common sense."
"Admiral Stone, I've located them! We're on our way to get them and nothing anybody says will—"
"Still disobeying orders? Still mutiny?"
"My Good God, Admiral Stone! You wouldn't want me to abandon this search now that we've located them?"
"Wilson, you're out there with a crew of our top-flight infrawave engineers, physicists, and theorists, along with about eight billion dollars' worth of experimental gear. You're flying that responsibility into the teeth of an enemy."
"Admiral, I'm taking a calculated risk."
"If you manage to get back," snapped the admiral angrily, "you'll.... Oh, hell! It'll be better for you if you don't, that's all."
The detector dome came on again, and at the same time came the first faint failing whimper of a response from the reliable magnetic mass detectors. Wilson eyed the small celestial globe, saw that its angle-attack was that of the lifeship, and shouted into the phone:
"Admiral, we've got 'em on the magnetics! I'll be seein' you later."
He hung up the telephone on the admiral's shout of dismay....
Viggon Sarri snarled something to Regin Naylo and the second officer went below to snarl something at the engineering crew. They went to work shorting out the safeties and cutting out paths of attenuation.
Viggon Sarri read the detector with a set face and said, "Linus, we're barely keeping pace. Losing, if anything."
Linus Brein said, "You've got a half dozen one-man fighters aboard."
"They're no faster than.... Wait a minute! We can blow 'em out the forward catapult and add the catapult speed to the ship's speed."
The flagship became a flurry of action. Men hauled the fighters aloft and one by one they were hurled out of the launching tube. They kept their added velocity and slowly, yard by creeping yard, the fighters drew away from the mother space craft. But yard by crawling yard would be enough by the time the whole distance was covered....
Wilson said to Maury Allison, "You've got a tender ready?"
"Yes."
"All right, then. Let's plan this operation carefully. As I see it, we're going to have a split-second advantage, and we've got to make good use of it."
Allison eyed the dials on the magnetic-mass detector, and made some calibrating adjustments.
"From what I can tell," he said, "the lifeship is in free flight along a course not more than ten to fifteen degrees angle from our own free flight course. We've been in a slight-vector thrust, you know."
Wilson nodded. "That's all to our advantage. Now unless I've miscalculated, I think I can be belted out of here in your tender. I'll make contact, then continue on until you catch up with me. Right?"
"Sounds reasonable."
Allison gave some orders to one of his techs. The tech punched his keys for a half-minute and waited another ten seconds for a strip of paper to come out of the machine in jerky sequences. He tore the paper off when it had stopped, and handed it to Wilson.
"Here," he explained, "are a group of possible time-versus-velocity courses. Follow 'em exactly and we'll make space contact on the other side."
Wilson looked at Allison. "Wish me luck," he said.
Allison nodded. "You've got it," he said quietly. "You know we're for you, or we'd not be here."
"If I don't come back—"
Allison's face drew taut. "If you flop out there," he said solemnly, "Toby Manning is next in command, and he'll be forced to follow orders from Base. So don't flop, Ted."
"I won't," promised Wilson.
He fired up the tender, waited until everything was running hot and ready, and blasted himself out of the exit port forward. He set his magnetic detector and patch-corded it to the drive so that the warp-generator would close down and the drive would cease at the proper instant for deceleration in close proximity of the lifeship.
Although the long-range search radar was completely useless at velocities even approaching the speed of light, Wilson turned it on and checked it out in readiness. He patch-ordered it also to the basic space drive, to take over after the velocity of his ship fell below the speed at which radar became useful.
Then he waited, with one eye on the timer. The detector ship faded behind him and was lost as his lighter spacecraft responded to the drive.
He wished helplessly for an auto-timer drive, because he knew that his hand and eye were not accurate enough to do the job as smoothly as he'd have liked. He wanted a bigger ship with a monster-sized drive. One of those spaceport luggers that can hump spacers from berth to berth would have been fine, even though they carried insufficient storage power for anything more than close to Base operations. He wondered whether such a ship would be too massive for fast maneuverability, and decided to ask about that, some day.