"Well, if you say so, I suppose that's the way it's got to be," Haynes grumbled. He had been growling and snorting under his breath ever since it had become evident what Kinnison's recommendation was to be. "I don't like this thing of standing by and letting zwilniks thumb their noses at us, like Prellin did on Bronseca. That once was once too damned often."
"Well, you got him, finally, you know," Kinnison reminded, quite cheerfully, "and you can have these Eich, too—sometime."
"I hope," Haynes acquiesced, something less than sweetly. "QX, then—but put out a few jets. The quicker you get out here the sooner we can get back and clean out this hooraw's nest."
Kinnison grinned as he cut his beam. He knew that it would be some time before the port admiral could hurl the metal of the Patrol against Lyrane VIII; but even he did not realize just how long a time it was to be.
What occasioned the delay was not the fact that the communicator was in operation only at intervals: so many screens were out, they were spaced so far apart, and the punctures were measured and aligned so accurately that the periods of non-operation caused little or no loss of time. Nor was it the vast distance involved; since, as has already been pointed out, the matter in the intergalactic void is so tenuous that spaceships are capable of enormously greater velocities than any attainable in the far denser medium filling interstellar space.
No; what gave the Boskonians of Lyrane VIII their greatly lengthened reprieve was simply the direction of the line established by the communicator-beam punctures. Reasoning from analogy, the Lensmen had supposed that it would lead them into a star cluster, fairly well away from the main body of the Galaxy in either the zenith or the nadir direction. Instead of that, however, when the Patrol surveyors got close enough to the Second Galaxy so that their cone of possible error was very small in comparison with the gigantic lens of the island universe which they were approaching, it became clear that their objective lay deep within the Galaxy itself. At least, the prolongation of their line led well into it, and that fact gave the Lensmen to pause.
"I don't like this line a bit, chief," Kinnison told the admiral then. "Maybe it runs into a cluster on this side, but we can't figure on it. It'd smell like Limburger to have a fleet of this size and power nosing into their home territory, along what must be one of the hottest lines of communication they've got."
"Check," Port Admiral Haynes agreed. "QX so far, but it would begin to stink pretty quick now. We've got to assume that they know about spotting screens, whether they really do or not. If they do, they'll have this line trapped from stem to gudgeon, and the minute they detect us they'll cut this line out entirely. Then where'll you be?"
"Right back where I started from—that's what I'm yapping about. And to make matters worse, it's a thousand to one that the ape we are looking for is not going to be anywhere near the end of this line."