"I'll comb it millimeter by millimeter," asserted Wilson. "Miss Hemingway was on that spacer."
"Don't do anything foolish," warned the space admiral. "Just remember that you're a flight commodore and not a full squadron commander yet. You have your orders."
"I have. And I'll bring them back. Both lifeship loads."
"Then get going. Remember that every hour decreases their chances of a safe rescue. Luck, Wilson. Spaceman's luck!"
"Correct, Admiral Stone."
Less than a quarter-hour later, Ted Wilson's flight of twenty-five swift light spacecraft went barreling up out of Chicago Spaceport and into that region of the sky called Gemini....
Viggon Sarri sat in the main control cabin of the hunter spacecraft, quietly waiting for Linus Brein to finish some involved equations in logic symbols. When the long string of symbols had come to what looked like a satisfactory conclusion, Brein looked up.
"Any success?"
"Oh, yes indeed." Brein nodded. "Of course our interpretations of their speech is only symbolic at this point. But this much we know. This series of sounds—" he snapped a switch on the side of his desk and a wall speaker delivered a series of what sounded to them like sheer gibberish—"connotates as follows: Voice A has called for contact with any receiving station. Voice B has responded, informing A that he is ready to receive. Voice A then delivers a running account of the disaster, delivering his computed position, vector of travel, and space coordinates. I've untangled some of their tongue." Brein replayed the recording and stopped it after the first passage. He parroted the gibberish, "'Spaceflight Seventy-nine calling Distress.' That, Viggon, is interpreted in our tongue as 'Identification Number So-and-so calling to announce disaster.'"