"This," he said, holding up the equipment, "is familiar. It is a small detector-pulse receiver. It is coupled with an attenuator and a variable delay line, and a minute re-transmitter. The celestial globe will show a target approaching the ship at a velocity exceeding the speed of light, and will match the ship's acceleration, velocity, and course in microseconds."
He started his equipment, and across the celestial globe in three distant flashes came a flitting target, to stop short of the ship's spotter in the center of the globe. From the other detecting equipment came indications and presentations as to type of drive, size of ship, and wave bands of the other ship's radiation.
Jeffries laughed, turning off his equipment. "When equipment is very sensitive, in order to collect information from great distances, a rather minute transmitter can produce a heavy target," he said. "Now, above the dome of the building—watch!"
He turned a square box at the sky and set it going. Black Morgan's ship came swooping down, to stand above the observation dome of the building, its rifles trained on the men inside. Jeffries turned dials and the turret turned slowly. He manipulated another dial and the big ship turned to face away. Then it receded and was gone in a twinkling of an eye.
"Three-dimensional projector," he growled. "Just what they were using for moving pictures for a hundred years. And there's your answer!"
Captain Edwards stood up and nodded. "But look," he said. "How did the contact come?"
"Contact?" gritted Jeffries angrily. "The louse! He took off in a suit as the ship lifted from the port, and clung to it with his magnetics like a flea on a dog until he had a chance to do his job at high velocity. Then he would drop off and radio-control his own ship which was running free a few million miles behind, and destined to come within a few million miles of his position. It was set to about match his speed, and then at that velocity, to circle and spiral until it was within his range. There was no one aboard it, and so he could cram on gravities until it creaked. I swear it had on sixty gravities."