"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.
* * * * *
The hundredth-second sweep hand of his watch came around and up, and
he began matching its motion with a rhythmic beat of his hand on the
reversal lever as the hand crossed the tenth-second marks. By the time
the hand was swinging close to the zero-second, his beat was close to
perfect.
The hand crossed the top and Wilson beat down on the lever hard!
The ship swung around in space and the drive flared out on the
forecourse as the tender began to beat its terrific velocity down.
Wilson felt that peculiar prickling of the skin that comes with a
swiftly closing warp-generator, but he knew that it was deliberate, and
not a failure.
He tried to force it down faster; tried to make the driver harder. His
hand rapped the power lever again and again, ramming it against its
hard stop as if he could force the setting higher than maximum.
There would be particular hell to pay when he got back home, but
he would have the personal satisfaction of having accomplished his
mission. He put the future out of his mind because he had no idea of
what kind of special hell would be given to a man who was successful,
because of disobeying orders.
He watched the meter crawl down to the red mark and below. Then the
warp-generator collapsed with a jar. It was a little too soon. The
speed of the tender was still high--not above light, of course, but
high enough so that its Einstein Mass created quite a warp in space.
He felt the heat leap high and knew that the tender had slowed with
the same sort of deceleration as a bullet hitting a patch of thin wool.
He did not lurch in the ship for he, himself, had the same Einstein
Mass effect. He felt a hot-sweat fever fill him as the excess mass
reconverted into energy.
He shook it off, but knew that eventually he would pay for that sudden
fever, with its biological effects. Then the long-range search radar
produced a distant response and Ted Wilson put everything out of his
mind except the problem of matching velocities with the free-flying
lifeship.
He called on the close-range radio, frantically pleading for those in
the lifeship to alert and be ready. He got no answer, which made him
break out in a cold sweat.
The radar picked up the flight of Viggon Sarri's one-man fighters, and
Wilson looked out of the dome to see if they were within sight.
They were, of course, too distant to be visible, but in the radar they
were closing fast, converging upon the lifeship from a fairly tight
solid angle. He clenched his fists and made a fast calculation. So far,
he was ahead.
One of the course plots gave him a full twenty seconds at the lifeship.
Anxiously Wilson tried to urge his ship on, even though he knew very
well that the equations of time and velocity and distance provided only
a single solution that could be considered at all practical.
When he caught visual sight of the lifeship, he estimated it to be no
more than three or four miles ahead. His radar confirmed that. It was
nerve-killing to wait as he closed down the separation, knowing that
the enemy fighter craft were also closing down.