"Then bust something!" barked Wilson.
Manning and Wainright took off below, while Ted watched the spot over his head. He tried to guess whether he was closer to the lifeship than the enemy, or whether it was the other way around. Not that it made any difference to the chase, but it did mean that he or the enemy was the faster of the two.
Wilson put his chips on the enemy. But until he had two sides of range to his included angle of forty-odd degrees, no one could tell.
Then the spot moved down a bare trifle, faltered, and continued to flow slowly back toward the rim of the dome.
Wilson gave a howl of victory just as the infrawave detector conked out again. The crew scurried madly to repair the fault. He was still looking glumly at the blank dome when the infrawave phone rang beside him.
"Wilson!" he barked in it angrily.
"Wilson, I'm pleading with you to use some common sense."
"Admiral Stone, I've located them! We're on our way to get them and nothing anybody says will—"
"Still disobeying orders? Still mutiny?"
"My Good God, Admiral Stone! You wouldn't want me to abandon this search now that we've located them?"