Hagen was awake when his first alarm came. For three days he had been wondering just why and how a rookie could be qualified for Base One; this had cheated him of sleep, and made his waking hours a mad pattern of hard duty and pointless wondering. But when the gong rang in his dormitory room at Base One, he reacted eagerly.
Although this was Hagen's first alarm, years of precision drill had given him the instinctive pattern for action. He dressed in the required time, caught up his equipment and met the stream of men pouring out of their rooms; he followed them from the huge building, out across the spaceport, to the myriad of Guardian spacecraft that awaited them.
Steve wondered where they were going, then realized that it was more than probable that the squadron commander himself did not know yet, and would not know until about one second before the flight took off for deep space. Somewhere, down in the bowels of the huge building, computers were digesting information rapidly, spilling out answers that would have to be summed into an equation before anyone would know the source of the alarm.
It was, Steve knew with the rest of the men, an imminent alarm. The machinery had not blown—yet; it might not blow—ever. It might be stopped by the Guardians before it went—or they might arrive in time to save everything but the mere hull of the ship that sped through subspace with the warp generator heading towards failure because of any one, or two, or a hundred various reasons.
It was Steve's job—with the other Guardians—to save what they could—if they could—and if not, to stop the spread of raw energy.
He reached his Guardian ship and settled himself into the crash pads. He pressed the button that told the squadron commander that he was ready, and his warning lamp winked into life on the broad lamp-board in the commander's ship; one more light among the rest. Then Hagen waited.
Forty seconds later came the warning bell, and the squadron began to take off, ship by ship, second by second. With a precision that would have been impossible without the master control of the commander's ship, the squadron took off, and reached the speed of light in one second. Then, second by second, the velocity doubled, re-doubled, and re-re-redoubled until the stars of the nearby galaxy were flowing past them like oncoming headlights along a busy highway.
