Chapter 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! 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.

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 am _not_ placing 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!"