Andrews took a deep breath.
Norton relaxed and lit a cigarette.
Alice looked around the cabin wildly and cried, "Ted—Ted! You can't fail us now!"
They sat there in their little lifeship cabin, cold and frightened, and they listened to the chatter going on across space from ship to ship and an occasional call to Base. Hope waxed and waned; they were as lost as any human being has ever been lost.
Yet somewhere out there men were searching for them. They could be light years distant; they might even be going in the other direction. But it could be just the minute after the next when a wild happy yell would burst from the infrawave receiver to inform the known Universe that the lost had been found!
And so they waited—and hoped....
Commander Hatch, tired of inactivity, was loafing along out deep in space on the trail of a clustered group of the infrawave detector's improbable findings. But this time it was not a spurious response he got.
He flicked past Viggon Sarri's flagship at no more than a half-mile distance and blinked at what he saw, hoping to scan it more closely on the image that his eye retained. The big flagship had come out of the black in a flash and a fluid line of sparkling lights, had blasted into size, and had been behind him in another flick. It left only that flowing image on Hatch's retina, but that was enough.
"That," he said aloud in his one-man ship, "was a spacecraft! And big!"