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Updated: June 22, 2025
As weapons officer, I intend to take the Plumie ship, let out its air, fill its tanks with our air, start up its drive, and turn it over to you for navigation back to base!" Baird raged. But he said coldly: "We're a long way from home, Mr. Taine, and the Dirac pusher drive is slow.
He leaped briskly toward nothingness. There came quick darkness once more, and Baird struggled erect despite the adhesiveness of the Niccola's hull. When he was fully upright, sick with horror at what had come about, there was sunlight yet again, and men were coming out of the Niccola's air lock, and the Plumie who'd leaped for space was pulling himself back to his own ship again.
It was not startlingly intellectual information to be sent out in tiny clicks ranging up and down the radio spectrum. But it was orders. Baird sat with compressed lips. Diane listened for a repetition of any of the transmitted signals, sent back by the Plumie. The speakers about the radar room murmured the orders given through all the ship.
You will go to your quarters, under arrest! Mr. Baird, burn him down if he hesitates!" Then there was a rushing, and scrambling figures appeared and were all about. They were members of the Niccola's crew, sent by the skipper. They regarded the Plumie with detachment, but Taine with a wary expectancy. Taine turned purple with fury. He shouted. He raged.
But it was actually 06 hours 35 minutes ship time before the two spacecraft sighted each other more than two hours after they plunged toward a rendezvous. The Plumie ship was a bright golden dot, at first. It decelerated swiftly. In minutes it was a rounded, end-on disk. Then it swerved lightly and presented an elliptical broadside to the Niccola. The Niccola was in full deceleration too, by then.
A million and a half. Two million ... Baird called the navigation room. "Looks like a single Plumie ship, sir," he reported. "At least there's one ship which is nearest by a very long way." "Hah!" grunted the skipper. "Then we'll pay him a visit. Keep an open line, Mr. Baird!" His voice changed. "Mr. Taine! Report here at once to plan tactics!" Baird shook his head, to himself.
He knew from Diane's expression that there was no sound in the headphones except the frying noise all main-sequence stars give out, and the infrequent thumping noises that come from gas-giant planets' lower atmospheres, and the Jansky-radiation hiss which comes from everywhere. The skipper swore. The Plumie ship lay broadside to, less than a score of miles away. It shone in the sunlight.
The assumption was that any rational creature would grasp the idea that orderly signals were rational attempts to open communication. But it had occurred to Baird that a Plumie might not see this point. Perception of order is not necessarily perception of information in fact, quite the contrary. A message is a disturbance of order.
The Plumie ship was no more than six miles away, dancing somehow deftly in the light of a yellow sun, with all the cosmos spread out as shining pin points of colored light behind it. The radar reported the dash and the death of the two rockets, after their struggle with invisible things that gripped them.
Instead, he was ashamed. The skipper growled inarticulately. He looked at the Plumie, again standing in the golden ship's air lock. "We'll go back, Mr. Baird. What you've done won't save our lives, and nobody will ever know you did it. But I think well of you. Come along!" This was at 11 hours 5 minutes ship time.
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