Harcraft broke in, “That tale about an Ankorbadian fleet build-up has been discredited a full thousand times. When they pried that crazy scout out of his ship, he was an hour away from the crematorium. You try spending forty-six days in space without food or water sometime! You’ll see hidden arsenals of alien ships till hell won’t have it.”
“And,” added Banner, “where is this fleet build-up supposed to take place? The patrol has had every planet in reachable space under scheduled surveillance for the past twenty years. You don’t hide a thousand S-type cruisers in somebody’s pocket.”
“So nobody’s scared, huh?” said Arnold. “So the entire space command has been playing footsie all over the galaxy for twenty years looking for a thousand ships that aren’t there in the first place, huh?”
“Routine surveillance,” said Harcraft.
“A thousand ships,” said Arnold, slapping his sweating forehead. “They’ll burn through our defense system like—”
“You’re a paranoid rabble rouser,” said Banner lightly. “We’ve got work to do up here. How about getting back to your bunk?”
Two days later they made scheduled contact with the caravan of potato fertilizer and tractor fuel. One thousand sleds, in tandem, were in proper orbit two hundred miles above Sedor II. Their orders provided for a landing on the planet and a short ship-leave, at the discretion of the ship’s pilot to refresh personnel.
Banner and Harcraft decided against landing. All necessary contact, now that they were out of hyperdrive, could be accomplished with the ship’s radio. Short planetfalls were, psychologically, more trouble than they were worth, often destroying the hard-earned, delicate space orientation which was their only defense against the abysmal boredom.
“It’s a dull place anyway,” explained Harcraft to Arnold, who had come up to the control room. “It’s a mining and processing settlement. Maybe five hundred families altogether. Got a funny religion, too.”