The radar picked up the flight of Viggon Sarri's one-man fighters, and Wilson looked out of the dome to see if they were within sight.
They were, of course, too distant to be visible, but in the radar they were closing fast, converging upon the lifeship from a fairly tight solid angle. He clenched his fists and made a fast calculation. So far, he was ahead.
One of the course plots gave him a full twenty seconds at the lifeship. Anxiously Wilson tried to urge his ship on, even though he knew very well that the equations of time and velocity and distance provided only a single solution that could be considered at all practical.
When he caught visual sight of the lifeship, he estimated it to be no more than three or four miles ahead. His radar confirmed that. It was nerve-killing to wait as he closed down the separation, knowing that the enemy fighter craft were also closing down.
The infrawave chattered, "Wilson? How are we doing?"
Wilson told him what was going on, and Allison urged Wilson to brace himself. Allison talked steadily in a calm voice, knowing just how hard it was for Wilson to sit there, a helpless victim of a pre-set, mechanical program that promised a pre-calculated victory of time and space and velocity.
Wilson's human mind would not really be trusting calculations and split-time electronic measurements. It would demand that he leave his ship and run, that he take the levers and drive, that he do something—anything—except sit there calmly and dog it through.
Wilson saw the drive flares of the enemy, bright and dangerous, closing in from a distance of a good many miles. It was mere miles, out here in deep space where a mile was a meaningless, insignificant quantity. He could almost feel the immensity of space around him in comparison to the awful closeness of danger.
Wilson had expected that at least those aboard the lifeship would be peering out of the observation port. He put himself in their place and knew he would have been scanning the dead and merciless sky for the first sight of a flare. But as his tender crept up alongside the lifeship with maddening slowness, there was no sign of life aboard.