But there were some ships which proceeded quietly to their positions and others which did the same after tumult amounting to rebellion. And naturally there were a few others which seemed incapable of co-operation with anybody. They went careening through the other ships' paths in what must have seemed to the planet's sunset area like a most unlikely dancing of brand-new stars.
It was a gigantic traffic tangle, and Hoddan's boat drifted toward and into it. He'd counted a hundred ships long before. His count now passed two hundred and continued. Before he gave up he'd numbered two hundred forty-seven space-oddities swarming to make a whirling band—a ring—around the planet Darth.
He was fairly sure that he knew what they were, now. But he could not possibly guess where they came from. And most mysterious of all was the question of why they'd come out of faster-than-light drive to make of themselves a celestial feature about a planet which had practically nothing to offer to anybody.
Presently the spaceboat was in the very thick of the fleet. His communicator spouted voices whose tones ranged from basso profundo to high tenor, and whose ideas of proper astrogation seemed to vary more widely still.
"You there!" boomed a voice with deafening volume. "You're in our clear-space! Sheer off!"
The volume of a signal in space varies as the square of the distance. This voice was thunderous. It came apparently from a nearby, pot-bellied tripper ship of really ancient vintage. Rows of ports in its sides had been welded over. It had rocket tubes whose size was indicative of the kind of long-obsolete fuel on which it once had operated. Slenderer nozzles peered out of the original ones now. It had been adapted to modern propellants by simply welding modern rockets inside the old ones. It was only half a mile away.
Hoddan's spaceboat floated on. The relative position of the two ships changed slowly. Another voice said indignantly:
"That's the same thing that missed us by less than a mile! You, there! Stop acting like a squig! Get on your own course!"
A third voice;