"I'm not hard to please. Just keep making offers. You'll hit on something."
"I'll tell Gloria," suggested Paul.
Stacey cleared his throat. "Gloria is a very smart woman," he said. "She would believe you only if she had seventeen confirming witnesses—or the odd look on my face. So—Migawd! What was that?"
The ground trembled and the air racketed to the blast of explosion. A flash of white flame filled the sky.
Had the blast been atomic the shock-wave would have flattened the Latham Alpha IV station. It was that close. But it was just common high explosive of the chemical type that shattered at them, and cracked a couple of windows in the Relay Station not far away.
"Bombs!" shouted Stacey.
Paul raced to the control panel and set the drive; he wanted to get a long way from there and he did not care which way. Just away....
Hoagland's crew had gotten off first. This followed a certain kind of reasoning that shows less troublesome planning to destroy than to protect. His crews had driven their ships as fast and as hard as ships and men could stand the gaff. The flight had dropped down out of supervelocity one by one, a quarter of a light year from Latham Alpha, coming into real space in a volume spherically as large as the outer limits of the Solar System.
Here the earlier arrivals had waited for the followers, since no two ships could drive at precisely the same speed across a galactic distance. They had closed down into formation as they came out of superspeed, each arrival taking its place in the space pattern.