e in a hurry,
it worked in a hurry, and that was good enough for Coulter. He'd
submitted a report on it to Colonel Silton.

"You've got him, Paul. We're dead on his tail, five hundred miles back,
and matching velocity. Turn forty-two degrees right, and you're lined up
right on him." Johnson was pleased with the job he'd done.

Coulter watched the pip move into his sightscreen. It settled less than
a degree off dead center. He made the final corrections in course, set
the air pressure control to eight pounds, and locked his helmet.

"Nice job, Johnny. Let's button up. You with us, Guns?"

Garrity sounded lazy as a well-fed tiger. "Ah'm with yew, cap'n."

Coulter advanced the throttle to 5 G's. And with the hiss of power, SF
308 began the deadly, intricate, precarious maneuver called a combat
pass--a maneuver inherited from the aerial dogfight--though it often
turned into something more like the broadside duels of the old sailing
ships--as the best and least suicidal method of killing a spaceship. To
start on the enemy's tail, just out of his radar range. To come up his
track at 2 mps relative velocity, firing six .30 caliber machine guns
from fifty miles out. In the last three or four seconds, to break out
just enough to clear him, praying that he won't break in the same
direction. _And to keep on going._

_Four minutes and thirty-four seconds to the break._ Sixty seconds at 5
G's; one hundred ninety-two seconds of free wheeling; and then, if they
were lucky, the twenty-two frantic seconds they were out here
for--throwing a few pounds of steel slugs out before them in one
unbroken burst, groping out fifty miles into the darkness with steel and
radar fingers to kill a duplicate of themselves.

_This is the worst. These three minutes are the worst._ One hundred
ninety-two eternal seconds of waiting, of deathly silence and deathly
calm, feeling and hearing nothing but the slow pounding of their own
heartbeats. Each time he got back, it faded away, and all he remembered
was the excitement. But each time he went through it, it was worse. Just
standing and waiting in the silence, praying they weren't
spotted--staring at the unmoving firmament and knowing he was a
projectile hurtling two miles each second straight at a clump of metal
and flesh that was the enemy. Knowing the odds were twenty to one
against their scoring a kill ... unless they ran into him.

* * * * *

At eighty-five seco