Ships in overdrive avoid each other carefully, for self-evident reasons. But the Yarrow was driving toward a ship which was not in motion but should have known of the Yarrow's approach. It had a very weak field in existence, so weak that it couldn't possibly do anything but notify the Yarrow's presence and approach. But it hadn't moved!
The mate blinked and struggled with the problem.
"Maybe we'd better keep away, sir," he suggested.
Trent finished sealing his own spacesuit. He put on the helmet and opened the face plate.
"Go see that the engineer's gadget is ready for use," he commanded. "I'll try it first."
The mate went out. Trent shrugged his shoulders. No ship in pirate-infested space should lie still, emitting a weak drive field which was an invitation to pirates to approach. The fact that one did exactly that suggested a very specific event in the course of happening. The mate didn't see it, which was possibly why he was still a mate.
The Yarrow continued to approach the source of a feeble overdrive field, capable at this strength only of operating as a detector of other overdrive fields. But the Yarrow's approach didn't cause it to move, either to avoid the Yarrow or to attack it. Which was also unreasonable. It suggested that the crewmen of the other ship had some enterprise in hand which was too absorbing to let anybody bother about instrument?.
Trent's expression was at once formidable and absorbed. The formidable part was much the stronger. His lips were a firm straight line. From his pilot's chair he surveyed the control board again. The signal-analysis setup continued to work, re-observing the data which was all it could report.
The source of the remarkably weak detector field was a thousand miles away. Five hundred. Two hundred. One. Trent said in a clipped voice, "Engine room! Is that gadget ready for use?"
The mate's voice replied from a speaker.
"Just a minute, sir. The engineer says he was improving it. But he's getting it back together, sir."
Trent swore, in a level voice. He swung the Yarrow a second time in the infinite blackness of overdrive. The other ship would be in normal space. It's drive was turned to detector-strength only, which meant that it couldn't do anything but detect other drives. That other ship would see the Milky Way and a thousand million stars. The Yarrow, approaching it, saw nothing. It was like one of those legendary submarines of the wars on Earth. It was blind and invisible because it was in overdrive, but it came nearer and nearer to its unseen quarry.
Trent said shortly, "All hands close face plates. Use air from your suit tanks. I'm breaking out of overdrive. Engine room, how about that gadget?"
The mate's voice, troubled, "Another minute, sir! Not more than another minute!"
Trent said in the iciest of voices, "I'm breaking out now. Let me know when to start charging it. Rocket launchers, stay ready but wait for orders."
Then he turned the overdrive switch to "off."
He felt, of course, those acutely unpleasant sensations which always accompany entering or leaving the overdrive state. One is acutely dizzy and horribly nauseated for the fraction of a second. One has the helpless feeling of falling through a contracting spiral. Then, suddenly, it is all over.
The Yarrow was back in normal space.
But the nearest-object dial registered something impossibly close. The dead-ahead screen showed what Trent had guessed at. It showed the other ship and why it was still. It even showed why nobody was paying attention to the readings of drive-detector instruments.
Twenty miles away from where the Yarrow had just broken out of overdrive, a bulky merchantman lay dead in space. Two miles from it a smaller, lighter ship stood by. Spaceboats from the smaller vessel were pulling toward the larger ship.
The situation was self-explanatory. A pirate or a privateer had blown the overdrive of a merchantman, most probably the Hecla out of Midway and bound for the Pleiads, for Loren. The merchantman had evidently been crippled so it could not flee. And as it lay helpless, boats from the pirate ship were now moving to board their victim. And the crewmen of the marauder were too busy watching to notice detector dials.
II
The emergence of the Yarrow from overdrive would naturally set strident gongs to ringing in both the other ships. The space-communicator speaker in the ceiling of the control room babbled frantically, "Mayday! Mayday! Calling for help! A pirate has blown our overdrive and shelled us! Mayday! Mayday! Hel—"
There was a crashing noise in the speaker. The wail for aid from the merchantman was blotted out and destroyed by a monstrous pure white noise. It came from the smaller ship. Somebody in the control room there had been stung to action by the Yarrow's breakout. He'd seen, at last, the visible detector signal, and as a first emergency reaction he'd turned loose pure noise. It jammed the rest of the distress call and would have made cooperation between the Yarrow and the Hecla impossible, had it been possible in the first place.
The speaker made other noises, originating in the engine room. Trent swore. He flipped off the communicator from the need to have in-ships reports. The mate's voice came, startlingly clear:
"Gadget's ready to charge, sir. The engineer says so. You can charge the gadget."
Ahead where the two strange craft lay, the spaceboats from the smaller one reversed their motion and raced back toward the ship from which they'd come. That vessel continued to transmit a powerful blast of ear-splitting sound, the reception of which Trent had just stopped. The merchantman continued to beg frantically for help.
"Go ahead, sir," repeated the mate from the Yarrow's engine room. "It's all right to charge."
Trent fumbled for the first of the two new controls on the instrument board. The first should draw on the drive circuit for thousands of kilowatts to charge the gadget's power bank of capacitors. It should continue to draw for minutes. Then a tripping of the second new control should mean the discharge of energy in one blast of power that ought to blow the pirate's drive and leave it helpless and limited to normal-space drive.
This could be done only with both ships in overdrive. But Trent was confident that he could force the pirate into that quasi-cosmos and there let the gadget cripple it, forcing it back to normality where it might be dealt with. He had only police-type rockets, to be sure, but there were other means. In any case, at the least and worst he should be able to take off the Hecla's ship's company and carry them to port, and then return with better weapons to finish off the pirate. He should be able to do it before it could rewind its overdrive.
His fingers found the charging switch. Thrown, it should begin to charge up. In minutes it would be ready. The pirate could be gotten into overdrive where it would expect to blow the Yarrow's drive. But its own field generator should flash and arc and perhaps even melt down.
He threw the charging switch.
There was a racking, crashing explosion in the engine room. The smell of vaporized metal and burnt insulation spread through the Yarrow. There were shoutings.