"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."