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! And
_big_!"
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.