p calls
going planetward, instead of listening vainly for replies from the
nonoperative landing grid.

Instantly voices boomed in his ears. Many voices. An impossibly large
number of voices. Many, many, many more than nine transmitters were in
operation now!

"_Idiot!_" said a voice in quiet passion, "_sheer off or you'll get in
our drive-field!_" A high-pitched voice said; "_... And group two take
second-orbit position--_" Somebody bellowed: "_But why don't they
answer?_" And another voice still said formally: "_Reporting group five,
but four ships are staying behind with tanker_ Toya, _which is having
stabilizer trouble...._"

Hoddan's eyes opened very wide. He turned down the sound while he tried
to think. But there wasn't anything to think. He'd come aloft to scout
three ships that had turned to nine, because he was in such a fix on
Darth that anything strange might be changed into something useful. But
this was more than nine ships--itself an impossibly large space fleet.
There was no reason why ships of space should ever travel together.
There were innumerable reasons why they shouldn't. There was a limit to
the number of ships that could be accommodated at any spaceport in the
galaxy. There was no point, no profit, no purpose in a number of ships
traveling together--

Darth's sunrise-line appeared far ahead. The lifeboat would soon cease
to be a bright light in the sky, now. The sun's image vanished from the
rear screens. The boat went hurtling onward through the blackness of the
planet's shadow while voices squabbled, and wrangled, and formally
reported, and now and again one admonished disputants to a proper
discipline of language.

During the period of darkness, Hoddan racked his brains for the vaguest
of ideas on why so many ships should appear about an obscure and
unimportant world like Darth. Presently the sunset line appeared ahead,
and far away he saw moving lights which were the hulls of the volubly
communicating vessels. He stared, blankly. There were tens-- Scores-- He
was forced to guess at the stark impossibility of more than a hundred
spacecraft in view. As the boat rushed onward he had to raise the guess.
It couldn't be, but--

He turned on the outside telescope, and the image on its screen was more
incredible than the voices and the existence of the fleet itself. The
scope focused first on a bulging, monster, antiquated freighter of a
design that had not been built for a hundred years. The