"Getting in trouble," said Calhoun briefly.
Silence. The screens showed a tiny pin point of moving light, far away toward emptiness. Calhoun computed his course. He changed it.
"Med ship!" rasped the spacephone. "Keep out of the way of our missile! It's a megaton bomb!"
Calhoun said irrelevantly:
"Those who in quarrels interpose, must often wipe a bloody nose." He added. "I know what it is."
"Let it alone!" rasped the voice. "The grid on the ground has spotted it. They're sending up rocks to fight it."
"They're rotten marksmen," said Calhoun. "They missed me!"
He aimed his ship. He knew the capacities of his ship as only a man who'd handled one for a long time could. He knew quite exactly what it could do.
The rocket from remoteness—the megaton-bomb guided missile—came smoking furiously from the stars. Calhoun seemed to throw his ship into a collision course. The rocket swerved to avoid him, though guided from many thousands of miles away. There was a trivial time-lag, too, between the time its scanners picked up a picture and transmitted it, and the transmission reached the Phaedrian fleet and the controlling impulses reached the missile in response. Calhoun counted on that. He had to. But he wasn't trying for a collision. He was forcing evasive action. He secured it. The rocket slanted itself to dart aside, and Calhoun threw the Med ship into a flip-flop and—it was a hair-raising thing—slashed the rocket lengthwise with his rocket flame. That flame was less than half an inch thick, but it was of the temperature of the surface of a star, and in emptiness it was some hundreds of yards long. It sliced the rocket neatly. It flamed hideously, and even so far, Calhoun felt a cushioned impact from the flame. But that was the missile's rocket fuel. An atom bomb is the one known kind of bomb which will not be exploded by being sliced in half.
The fragments of the guided missile went on toward the planet, but they were harmless.