Erg Noor got up from his seat and Nisa’s train of thought was broken.

“I’m going to the charthouse. You’ll be able to sleep in — ” he looked at the clock showing dependent or ship’s time, “nine hours. I’ll have time for some sleep before I relieve you.”

“I’m not tired, I can stay here as long as is necessary — you must get some rest!”

Erg Noor frowned and wanted to object but was captivated by the tenderness of her words and by the golden hazel eyes that appealed to him so trustingly; he smiled and went out without another word.

Nisa sat down in the chair, cast an accustomed glance over the instruments and was soon lost in deep meditation.

The reflector screens through which those in the control tower could see what was happening in the space surrounding the ship gleamed black overhead. The lights of differently coloured stars pierced the eyes like needles of fire.

The spaceship was overtaking a planet and its pull made the ship vacillate in a gravitation field of changing intensity. The magnificent but malignant stars also made wild leaps in the reflector screens. The outlines of the constellations changed with a rapidity that the memory could not register.

Planet K2-2N 88, cold, lifeless, far from its sun, was known as a convenient rendezvous for spaceships… for the meeting that had not taken place. The fifth circle — Nisa could picture her ship travelling with reduced speed around a monster circle with a radius of a thousand million kilometres and constantly gaining on a planet that crawled at tortoise speed. In a hundred and ten hours the ship would complete the fifth circle — and what then? Erg Noor’s tremendous brain was now strained to the utmost to find the best solution. As commander both of the expedition and the ship he could not make mistakes for if he did First Class Spaceship Tantra with its crew of the world’s most eminent scientists would never return from outer space! But Erg Noor would make no mistakes.