Howell swung the yacht to an entirely new direction. On the dial that told of another ship’s breakout, a needle quivered. It would have to be a slug-ship. On the instant Howell had the Marintha out of normal space again. He hoped it would be before the slug-ship’s detectors acted. He guessed at a reaction-time for that unpleasant ship’s pilot, and was back in normal space at about the instant the slug-ship should have left it. Then he went back into overdrive just as the slug-ship should have returned to normal space.
It was a matter of dodging, of outguessing the unseen pilot of the unseen enemy ship. It was an attempt to bewilder the monster at the controls of the enemy craft. And it seemed to work.
Sweating, Howell cut off all his own detection-instruments except the one that told of the other ship’s breakout, lest they give information as well as receive it. He dodged crazily between the real universe and the artificial one which was the state of being in overdrive.
The shifts back and forth were horrible. With each shift came the vertigo and nausea and the feel of falling. Repeated, it became torment. Karen looked white and ill, and the small-men lost their bland expectancy and became tense and nerve-racked.
And then Howell stopped the jumps into and out of overdrive. The Marintha lay still in space, with ten thousand myriads of stars about her. Howell scowled at the one instrument left in operation. But nothing happened. And nothing happened. And still nothing happened. There was no sign of any spacecraft or—after some minutes—artificial radiation in all of empty space.
After a long, long time, Howell said evenly, “It looks like we’ve lost whatever was after us. The question now is what to do next.”
The small-man with the red vest put his finger on a vision-screen. Howell nodded.
“That’s very likely the way for us to go,” he told Karen as evenly as before. “But we were detected in overdrive going away from there. I don’t know whether or not we’d be detected going back. If we were, their friends—” he nodded toward the now-recovered small-men, “their friends would pay for it unless they got away fast in their globe-ships. And Ketch and your father would definitely pay, unless they were taken on the globe-ships.”
Karen parted her lips to speak, and then did not.
The breakout-detector quivered. Howell did nothing. After minutes, it quivered again.
“We’re not in the clear,” said Howell, “but one of them popped out then and we didn’t react. So it popped back into overdrive. It’s hunting for signs of us there.”
He turned on all the detection-instruments. He’d been playing a very deadly game of blind-man’s-buff, with the Marintha driving blindly at multiples of light-speed between dodgings. Now Howell wiped sweat from his forehead.
“I’m going to try something new,” he said very grimly indeed. “We’ve been trying to dodge and run as fast as possible. Now we’ll try dodging and creeping. Watch this dial for me.”
He went back to the engine room and made adjustments to the overdrive unit. Under ordinary circumstances, of course, a ship going into overdrive instantly attained the maximum speed the overdrive-field could give it. In order to exist, such a field had to move, and whatever was enclosed in it had to move with and in it But the highest speed the Marintha could make wasn’t enough to leave its invisible pursuer behind. So Howell cut down the overdrive velocity to an absurdly small figure. What he did should cut down the flow of power associated with entry and breakout. It should reduce the likelihood of a blow-out. And just possibly, the weakened power-surges might be feeble enough to go undetected.
He went back to the control-board: The small-men watched his every movement. They murmured among themselves. The little man with the red vest went toward the engine room. He stopped and looked inquiringly at Howell. Howell paid no attention. The small-man went into the engine room. Howell continued to regard all the detection-instruments with a specifically grim expression.
Nothing happened. There was no quiver of the overdrive detection device. There was nothing from the all-wave receiver but the infinitesimal cracklings which were the solar flares of far-away suns, and very occasionally those singular flute-like musical notes for which there was as yet no known explanation but which some people called the music of the spheres.
Still nothing happened. The nearest-object indicator registered infinity—and would until its search-pulse had travelled for light-months or years and had been reflected back an equal distance, when the returned signal would be too faint to register.
The little man with the red vest came out of the engine room. He looked puzzled. He went to the garbage-disposal unit and looked it over carefully. Whatever he looked for he did not find. He rejoined the other small-men and they talked among themselves in low tones, as if not to disturb Howell. But they regarded him confidently.
“They still expect a miracle,” said Howell coldly, with his eyes moving swiftly from one instrument to another. “They’re going to be disappointed, unless…” he shrugged and said curtly, “Overdrive coming!”
He threw the switch. There was dizziness, but it was not disturbing. There was nausea, but it was trivial. The sensation of falling was hardly more marked than in a swiftly falling elevator. Even the screens did not blank out instantly. They seemed to fade instead of being abruptly extinguished. But the Marintha went into overdrive. Because of the adjustment of the generator, she was surrounded by a stress-envelope of strained space which had the properties of an overdrive-field, but barely so. By comparison with the speed at which the usual field-strength carried the Marintha, she crawled. She crept. She moved at a snail-like gait.
But it was still faster than the first interstellar voyagers had been able to travel. They, though, took six years to make a four-light-year journey between solar systems.
“We’re crawling now,” said Howell. “It’s just barely possible that whatever detects normal overdrive-fields won’t pick up one that’s so nearly something else. If I’m wrong about it—we’ll probably never know it.”
It was officially accepted theory that nothing could break into an overdrive-field. But it was also officially accepted that if the impossible happened and something did—if, for example, a ship in overdrive drove into a sun—that either the field would bounce and the ship’s occupants know nothing of the event, or else the overdrive-field would break with a simultaneous release of all the energy within the ship it surrounded. And in that case, the ship’s occupants would know nothing of the event because they’d be dead before they could realize it.
Now the Marintha drove more slowly than a detection instrument should be willing to credit. For hours on end the space-yacht remained sealed away from all the normal cosmos. It was not possible to see anything, hear anything, or know anything of the universe beyond the overdrive-field’s extension.
Howell said, “It seems to me that for two people who supposedly care for each other, Karen, we act less romantically than any other couple in history.”
Karen smiled faintly.
“But you’re busy taking me to where I’ll be safe, aren’t you?”
“Trying, yes. Succeeding—I don’t know. But at least we’re not acting like characters in a drama-tape!”
Karen looked at him with a peculiarly wry expression. Their chance of living seemed very small. She considered that she and Howell were very probably about to die. Naturally, she would have preferred their romantic state to loom at least as large as the danger they were in. But Howell was acting with complete sanity, trying to find even the last least chance for the two of them. Karen, though, would have settled for a little less sanity and a little more ecstasy in what might be their last moments of life. But a girl can hardly change the character of the man she does care about. Karen submitted to the way Howell happened to be made, because there was nothing else to do.