"Got 'em, skipper," the pilot replied, positively. "It was touch and go for ninety seconds, but I've got a CRX tracer on him now at full pull. He can't put out enough jets to get away from that. I can hold him forever!"
"Fine work, Hen!" Kinnison strapped himself into his seat and donned his headset. "General call! Attention! Battle stations! By stations, report!"
"Station 1, tractor beams—hot!"
"Station 2, repellers—hot!"
"Station 3, projector 1—hot!"
Thus station after station of the warship of the void reported, until: "Station 58, the Q-gun—hot!" Kinnison himself reported; then gave to the pilot the words which throughout the space-ways of the galaxy had come to mean complete readiness to face any emergency.
"Hot and tight, Hen—let's take 'em!"
The pilot shoved his blast lever, already almost at maximum, clear out against its stop and hunched himself even more intently over his instruments. As moved his pointers, so varied the direction of the thrust that was driving the Brittania toward the enemy at the unimaginable velocity of ninety parsecs an hour[3]—a velocity possible only to inertialess matter being urged through an almost perfect vacuum by a driving blast capable of lifting the stupendous normal tonnage of the immense sky rover against a gravity ten times that of her native Earth.
Unimaginable? Completely so—the ship of the Galactic Patrol was hurling herself through space at a pace in comparison with which any speed that the mind can grasp would be the merest crawl: a pace to make light itself seem stationary.
Ordinary vision would have been useless, but the observers of that day used no antiquated optical system. Their detector beams, converted into light only at their plates, were heterodyned upon and were carried by subethereal ultra-waves; vibrations residing far below the level of the ether and thus possessing a velocity and a range infinitely greater than those of any possible ether-borne wave.