"If you will come to our leading ship," said the voice, "we will answer all your questions. I will have a smoke flare set off to guide you."
Hoddan said to himself:
"No threats and no offers. I can guess why there are no threats. But they should offer something!"
He waited. There was a sudden huge eruption of vapor in space some two hundred miles away. Perhaps an ounce of explosive had been introduced into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized, added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive's gases. A cauliflowerlike shape of filmy whiteness appeared and grew larger and thinner.
Hoddan drove toward the spot with very light touches of rocket power. He swung the boat around and killed its relative velocity. The leading ship was a sort of gigantic, shapeless, utterly preposterous ark-like thing. Hoddan could neither imagine a purpose for which it could have been used, nor a time when men would have built anything like it. Its huge sides seemed to be made exclusively of great doorways now tightly closed.
One of those doorways suddenly gaped wide. It would have admitted a good-sized modern ship. A nervous voice essayed to give Hoddan directions for getting the spaceboat inside what was plainly an enormous hold now pumped empty of air. He grunted and made the attempt. It was tricky. He sweated when he cut off his power. But he felt fairly safe. Rocket flames would burn down such a door, if necessary. He could work havoc if hostilities began.
The great cargo door swung shut. The outside-pressure needle swung sharply and stopped at thirty centimeters of mercury pressure. There was a clanging. A smaller door evidently opened somewhere. Lights came on—old-fashioned glow tubes. Then figures appeared through a door leading to some other part of this ship.
Hoddan nodded to himself. The costume was odd. It was awkward. It was even primitive, but not in the fashion of the soiled but gaudily colored garments of Darth. These men wore unrelieved black, with gray shirts. There was no touch of color about them. Even the younger ones wore beards. And of all unnecessary things, they wore flat-brimmed hats—in a spaceship!
Hoddan opened the boat door and said politely:
"Good morning. I'm Bron Hoddan. You were talking to me just now."