He was strapped in the control-chair a good ten minutes before the ship was due to return to a normal state of things. He allowed himself the luxury of still another yawn. He waited.
The warning tape whirred a second time. A voice said, "When the gong sounds, breakout will be five seconds off." There was a heavy, rhythmic tick-tocking. It went on and on. Then the gong and a voice said: "Five—four—three—t—"
It did not complete the count. There was a tearing, rending noise and the spitting of an arc. There was the smell of ozone. The Med ship bucked like a plunging horse. It came out of overdrive two seconds ahead of time. The automatic, emergency-rockets roared and it plunged this way and changed course violently and plunged that, and seemed to fight desperately against something that frustrated every maneuver it tried. Calhoun's hair stood on end until he realized that the external-field indicator showed a terrific artificial force-field gripping the ship. He cut off the rockets as their jerkings tried to tear him out of his chair.
There was stillness. Calhoun rasped into the spacephone:
"What's going on? This is Med Ship Esclipus Twenty! This is a neutral vessel!" The term "neutral vessel" was new in Calhoun's vocabulary. He'd learned it while studying the manners and customs of war in overdrive. "Cut off those force-fields!"
Murgatroyd shrilled indignantly. Some erratic movement of the ship had flung him into Calhoun's bunk, where he'd held fast to a blanket with all four paws. Then another wild jerking threw him and the blanket together into a corner, where he fought to get clear, chattering bitterly the while.
"We're noncombatants!" snapped Calhoun—another new term.
A voice growled out of the spacephone speaker.
"Set up for light-beam communication," it said heavily. "In the meantime keep silence."
Calhoun snorted. But a Med ship was not an armed vessel. There were no armed vessels nowadays. Not in the normal course of events. But vessels of some sort had been on the watch for a ship coming to this particular place.