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He had to return his crew, and there was something else. Several something elses. He arrived in that solar-system and put his yacht in a search-orbit, listening for the call-signal the spaceboat should give for him to home on. He found it, deep within the gravity-field of Darth. He maneuvered to come alongside, and there was blinding light everywhere. Alarms rang. Lights went out.
Then there were cracklings of communicators, and orders flittered through emptiness in scrambled and re-scrambled broadcasts of gibberish which came out as lucid commands in the control-rooms of the ships. Then, first, the point, then the advanced flankers, and then the main fleet, line by line and rank by rank every ship drove on outward under top-speed solar-system drive.
Lowell fully recognises the identity of the constitution of matter and of physical laws throughout the solar-system, and that for any high form of organic life certain conditions which are absolutely essential on our earth must also exist in Mars.
He waited while the solar-system drive pushed the Med Ship a quarter of the way around the bright planet below. The sunset line vanished and the planet's disk became a complete circle. Then Calhoun listened to the monitor earphones again, and grunted once more, and changed course, and presently made a noise indicating satisfaction.
You wouldn't want her discovered and salvaged." "No," said Bors. He stood by a viewport as the Sylva drove away. The Isis ceased to be a shape and became the most minute of motes. Bors looked at his watch. "Not far enough yet," he said depressedly. "Everything will go." The yacht drove on. Fifteen twenty minutes at steadily increasing solar-system speed. "It's about due," said Bors.
"You'd rather it was that way." She looked at him for a long time, until he squirmed. Then she nodded and went away. An hour later the Wealdian space-fleet was reported, massed in space and driving for Dara. There were small scout-ships which came on ahead of the main fleet. They'd originally been guard-boats, intended for solar-system duty only and quite incapable of overdrive.
He was within half an hour's solar-system drive of the grain-fleet. There was no alarm, at first. Of course radars spotted the Med Ship as an object, but nobody paid attention. It was not headed for Weald. It was probably assumed to be a guard-boat itself. Such mistakes do happen. It reached the grain-fleet.
Again presently he abandoned instrument-control and peered directly out of a port, handling the solar-system drive with great care. Murgatroyd said depressedly; "Chee!" "Stop worrying," commanded Calhoun. "We haven't been challenged, and there is a beacon transmitter at work, just to make sure that nobody bumps into what we're looking for. It's a great help, because we do want to bump, gently."
But there was a wide area in between, in which combat was practical. The Mekinese battleship reached a height where it could maneuver on solar-system drive without rockets. It might, of course, flick into overdrive and be gone thousands of millions of miles within seconds. But that would be flight. It would not return accurately to the scene of the fight.
The distance was too short for even the briefest of overdrive hops, but it would take time to get there on solar-system drive. He thumbed down the communicator-button and spoke into a microphone. "Med Ship Aesclipus Twenty reporting arrival and asking coördinates for landing. Purpose of landing, planetary health inspection. Our mass is fifty tons standard.
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