Space Captain Frank Edwards shook his head. "Not unless someone has improved on the Manual of Flight Procedures," he said.
"Okay then. Here we go."
Commodore Wilson leaned back and watched the grid as Edwards got on the ship-to-ship and gave the operational orders. The little discs rearranged themselves slowly into a hexagonal lattice with their edges overlapping, then the flight began to move forward into the grid, running down the line of axis.
Somewhere inside of the cage made by the white lines a lifeship was drifting, a sub-sub-microscopic mote alone in a volume of space so large that light would take ten years to traverse the volume from top to bottom.
Wilson shook his head and took off his polaroids to brush his eyes. The stereo-field collapsed flat against the glass screen and became a meaningless jumble of lines. Wilson put his glasses back on hastily.
Captain Edwards said softly, "Take it easy, Ted. We'll find her."
Wilson nodded. "I know. But I can't help thinking how rough it must be."
"Why?"
"To take her first space flight and get involved in a blowup."