In return he received no heated retorts, no angry voice of authority. If he had broadcast the same words from a heavily manned battleship they’d have plastered him with forty charges and set the date for his court-martial. But it was space-navy convention that a lone scout’s job created an unavoidable craziness among all those who performed it and that ninety percent of them were overdue for psychiatric treatment. A scout on active service could and often did say things that nobody else in the space-navy dared utter. It is a wonderful thing to be recognised as dotty.

For three weeks they accompanied him in the glum silence with which a family takes around an imbecile relation. He chafed impatiently during this period because their top speed was far, far below his maximum velocity and the need to keep pace with them gave him the feeling of an urgent motorist trapped behind a funeral procession.

The Sirian battleship Wassoon was the chief culprit, a great clumsy contraption that wallowed along like a bloated hippopotamus while a shoal of faster cruisers and destroyers were compelled to amble with it. He did not know its name but he did know that it was a battleship because on his detector screens it resembled a glowing pea amid an array of fiery pinheads. Every time he looked at the pea he cursed it something awful. He was, again venting his ire upon it when the loudspeaker chipped in and spoke for the first time in many days.

“Ponk!”

Ponk? What the devil was ponk? The word meant something mighty important, he could remember that much. Hastily he scrabbled through his codebook and found it: Enemy in sight.

No sign of the foe was visible on his screens. Evidently they were beyond detector range and had been spotted only by the escort’s advance guard of four destroyers running far ahead.

“Dial F,” ordered the loudspeaker.