"Pilot!" cried Wilson. "Can't we pour on more power?"
The pilot rapped his levers with the heel of his hand and shook his head slowly. "Sorry, sir. We've been at the top of the military emergency range all along." Occasionally he looked back over his shoulder at the motionless enemy response in the dome.
No man in the detector room needed a fancy ranging detector and a computer to know the worst. The infrawave would not range, but it was good enough for this. The inefficient detector and knowledge of one of the simpler facts of navigation told the whole unhappy story.
When the angular position of a distant object remains constant to the observer in a moving vehicle, they are on collision course. And so long as that observed angle does not change, they will remain on that collision course, right up to the bump. Distance, or angle of attack does not contribute or detract. The fact remains.
The object may be stationary, or the observer may be stationary and the object moving, or both may be moving, but so long as that angle remains constant, they will collide. One may be curving and the other in acceleration or deceleration, but if the observed angle does not change, it's still collision.
In fact, there are only a couple of exceptions to this. One is when the subject object is astern and moving dead away from a collision, or what might have been one before either ship moved onto the course. The other is when a circle is cut with the object at dead center. Make it a spiral and you have your course of danger.
Put it in space, or on the sea, or in the air, or across the land, and the same holds true.
So the fact that the enemy warcraft hung at some forty or fifty degrees and did not change its position meant that the detector ship and the enemy warcraft were going to meet! And undoubtedly at the point where the lifeship would be in the middle because the enemy was obviously heading for that spot. When they hit, the enemy warcraft would come through the detector dome exactly where its response now registered.
"Can't we stretch something?" demanded Wilson.
Manning thought about it. "We'll bust something if we—"