The entire personnel of the plotting room froze solid.
"Wilson! I've just contacted a fleet of warcraft, big ships with nasty-looking projector sort of things looking out of mobile turrets. There are big ones! Bigger than anything we've ever built, and skeletonlike things that have open decks loaded with one-man fighters. They're—"....
Viggon Sarri said crisply, "Get him! Alive!"
Regin Naylo barked crisp orders, and some of the ships took off to surround the small Earth scout craft. One of the big cruiser class swerved over and hurled out a blanketing infrawave that quietly clamped down on space and shut off Hatch's transmission as abruptly as cutting the wires on a telephone line. Except that there was not even a click....
Wilson grabbed a phone and barked, "Froman! You're Hatch's second. Scout that! And report constantly!"
"Affirm, Commodore!"
Wilson called Admiral Stone. "Trouble, Admiral," he snapped curtly. "We've contacted what appears to be a war fleet in space."
Admiral Stone was dumbfounded. Like many others, he realized that the mathematical probabilities of there being another sentient race in the Galaxy was almost a certainty, that considering the billions of stars, the figures read to the tune of probably some twenty thousand such planetary races, even taking the probabilities in a pessimistic quantity.
But twenty thousand sentient races sprinkled across a volume of space with the infinity of the Galaxy gave each and every one of them a lot of room. Their making contact with one another was slightly less probable than the close passage of two stars.
Then the men of Earth waited again.