Correction! Cancel speedster meeting, we can compute that more accurately later. Advise adjutant Admiral Southworth will send order, through channels. Get me Base Hospital. . . Lacy, please . . . Kinnison’s hurt, sawbones, bad. I’m going out after him. Coming along?”
“Yes. How about. . .”
“On the green. Flotilla ZKD, including your new two-hundred-million-credit hospital, is going along. Slip twelve, Dauntless, eleven and one-half minutes from now. Hipe!” and the Surgeon-Marshal “biped.”
Two minutes before the scheduled take-off Base Navigations called the chief navigating officer of the Dauntless.
“Course to rendezvous with Flotilla ZKD latitude three fifty four dash thirty longitude nineteen dash forty two time approximately twelve dash seven dash twenty six place one dash three dash zero outside arbitrary galactic rim check and repeat” rattled from the speaker without pause or punctuation. Nevertheless the chief navigator got it, recorded it, checked and repeated it “Figures only approximations because of lack of exact data on variations in density of medium and on distance necessarily lost in detouring stars” the speaker chattered on “suggest instructing your second navigator to communicate with navigating officers Flotilla ZKD at time twelve dash zero to correct courses to compensate unavoidably erroneous assumptions in computation Base Navigations off.”
“Ill say he’s off! ‘Way off!” growled the Second. “What does he think I am—a complete nitwit? Pretty soon he’ll be telling me two plus two equals four point zero.”
The fifteen-second warning bell sounded. Every man came to the ready at his post, and precisely upon the designated second the super-dreadnought blasted off. For four or five miles she rose inert upon her under-jets, sirens and flaring lights clearing her way. Then she went free, her needle prow slanted sharply upward, her full battery of main driving projectors burst into action, and to all intents and purposes she vanished.
The Earth fell away from her at an incredible rate, dwindling away into invisibility in less than a minute. In two minutes the sun itself was merely a bright star, in five it had merged indistinguishably into the sharply-defined, brilliantly white belt of the Milky Way.
Hour after hour, day after day the Dauntless hurtled through space, swinging almost imperceptibly this way and that to avoid the dense ether in the neighborhood of suns through which the designated course would have led; but never leaving far or for long the direct line, almost exactly in the equatorial plane of the galaxy, between Tellus and the place of meeting.
Behind her the Milky Way clotted, condensed, gathered itself together; before her and around her the stars began rapidly to thin out. Finally there were no more stars in front of her. She had reached the “arbitrary rim” of the galaxy, and the second navigator, then on duty, plugged into Communications.
“Please get me Flotilla ZKD, Flagship Navigations,” he requested; and, as a clean-cut young face appeared upon his plate, “Hi, Harvey, old spacehound! Fancy meeting you out here!
It’s a small Universe, ain’t it? Say, did that crumb back there at Base tell you, too, to be sure and start checking course before you over-ran the rendezvous? If he was singling me out to make that pass at, I’m going to take steps, and not through channels, either.”
“Yeah, he told me the same. I thought it was funny, too— an oiler’s pimp would know enough to do that without being told. We figured maybe he was jittery on account of us meeting the admiral or something. What’s burned out all the jets, Paul, to get the big brass hats ‘way out here and all dithered up, and to pull us offa the cruise this way? Must be a hell of an important flit! You’re computing the Old Man himself, you must know something. What’s this speedster that we’re going to escort, and why? Give us the dope!”
“I don’t know anything, Harvey, honest, any more than you do. They didn’t put out a thing. Well, we’d better be getting onto the course—‘to compensate unavoidably erroneous assumptions in computation,’” he mimicked, caustically. “What do you read on my lambda?
Fourteen—three —point zero six—decrement. . .”
The conversation became a technical jargon; because of which, however, the courses of the flying space-ships changed subtly. The flottila swung around, through a small arc of a circle of prodigious radius, decreasing by a tenth its driving force. Up to it the Dauntless crept; through it and into the van. Then again in cone formation, but with fifty five units instead of fifty four, the flotilla screamed forward at maximum blast.
Well before the calculated time of meeting the speedster a Velantian Lensman who knew Worsel well put himself en rapport with him and sent a thought out far ahead of the flying squadron. It found its goal—Lensmen of that race, as has been brought out, have always been extraordinarily capable communicators—and once more the course was altered slightly. In due time Worsel reported that he could detect the fleet, and shortly thereafter: “Worsel says to cut your drive to zero,” the Velantian transmitted. “He’s coming up . . .
He’s close. . . He’s going to go inert and start driving . . . We’re to stay free until we see what his intrinsic velocity is . . . Watch for his flare.”
It was a weird sensation, this of knowing that a speedster —quite a sizable chunk of boat, really—was almost in their midst, and yet having all their instruments, even the electros, register empty space . . .
There it was! The flare of the driving blast, a brilliant streamer of fierce white light, sprang into being and drifted rapidly away to one side of their course. When it had attained a safe distance: “All ships of the flotilla except the Dauntless go inert,” Haynes directed. Then, to his own pilot. “Back us off a bit, Henderson, and do the same,” and the new flagship, too, went inert.
“How can I get onto the Pasteur the quickest, Haynes?” Lacy demanded.
“Take a gig,” the Admiral grunted, “and tell the boys how much you want to take. Three G’s is all we can use without warning and preparation.”
There followed a curious and fascinating spectacle, for the hospital ship had an intrinsic velocity entirely different from that of either Kinnison’s speedster or Lacy’s powerful gig. The Pasteur, gravity pads cut to zero, was braking down by means of her under-jets at a conservative one point four gravities—hospital ships were not allowed to use the brutal accelerations employed as a matter of course by ships of war.
The gig was on her brakes at five gravities, all that Lacy wanted to take—but the speedster! Worsel had put his patient into a pressure-pack and had hung him on suspension, and was “balancing her down on her tail” at a full eleven gravities!
But even at that, the gig first matched the velocity of the hospital ship. The intrinsics of those two were at least of the same order of magnitude, since both had come from the same galaxy. Therefore Lacy boarded the Red Cross vessel and was escorted to the office of the chief nurse while Worsel was still blasting at eleven G’s—fifty thousand miles distant then and getting farther away by the second—to kill the speedster’s Lundmarkian intrinsic velocity. Nor could the tractors of the warships be of any assistance—the speedster’s own vicious jets were fully capable of supplying more acceleration than even a pressure-packed human body could endure.
“How do you do, Doctor Lacy? Everything is ready.” Clarrissa MacDougall met him, hand outstretched. Her saucy white cap was worn as perkily cocked as ever: perhaps even more so, now that it was emblazoned with the cross-surmounted wedge which is the insignia of sector chief nurse. Her flaming hair was as gorgeous, her smile as radiant, her bearing as confidently—Kinnison has said of her more than once that she is the only person he has ever known who can strut sitting down!—as calmly poised. “I’m very glad to see you, doctor. It’s been quite a while . . .” Her voice died away, for the man was looking at her with an expression defying analysis.
For Lacy was thunder-struck. If he had ever known it—and he must have—he had completely forgotten that MacDougall had this ship. This was awful—terrible!
“Oh, yes ,. . yes, of course. How do you do? Mighty glad to see you again. How’s everything going?” He pumped her hand vigorously, thinking frantically the while what he would— what he could say next “Oh, by the way, who is to be in charge of the operating room?”
“Why, I am, of course,” she replied in surprise. “Who else would be?”
“Anyone else!” he wanted to say, but did not—then. “Why, that isn’t at all necessary . . . I would suggest . . .”
“You’ll suggest nothing of the kind!” She stared at him intently; then, as she realized what his expression really meant—she had never before seen such a look of pitying anguish upon his usually sternly professional face—her own turned white and both hands flew to her throat.