d their buttons. Nothing happened that
anybody could see. Actually, though, a small gadget outside the hull
began to cough rhythmically. Similar devices on the drones coughed, too.
They were small, multiple-barreled guns. Rifle shells fired two-pound
missiles at random targets in emptiness. They wouldn't damage anything
they hit. They'd go varying distances, explode and shoot small lead shot
ahead to check their missile-velocity, and then emit dense masses of
aluminum foil. There was no air resistance. The shredded foil would
continue to move through emptiness at the same rate as the convoy-fleet.
The seven ships had fired a total of eighty-four such objects away into
the blackness of Earth's shadow. There were, then, seven ships and
eighty-four masses of aluminum foil moving through emptiness. They
could not be seen by telescopes.

And radars could not tell ships from masses of aluminum foil.

If enemy radars came probing upward, they reported ninety-one space
ships in ragged but coherent formation, soaring through emptiness toward
the Platform. And a fleet like that was too strong to attack.

The radar operators had been prepared to forward details of the speed
and course of a single ship to waiting rocket-launching submarines
half-way across the Pacific. But they reported to Very High Authority
instead.

He received the report of an armada--an incredible fleet--in space. He
didn't believe it. But he didn't dare disbelieve it.

So the fleet swam peacefully through the darkness that was Earth's
shadow, and no attempt at attack was made. They came out into sunlight
to look down at the western shore of America itself. With seven ships to
get on an exact course, at an exact speed, at an exact moment, time was
needed. So the fleet made almost a complete circuit of the Earth before
reaching the height of the Platform's orbit.

They joined it. A single man in a space suit, anchored to its outer
plates, directed a plastic hose which stretched out impossibly far and
clamped to one drone with a magnetic grapple. He maneuvered it to the
hull and made it fast. He captured a second, which was worked delicately
within reach by coy puffs of steering-rocket vapor.

One by one, the drones were made fast. Then the manned ship went in the
lock and the great outer door closed, and the plastic-fabric walls
collapsed behind their nets, and air came in.

Lieutenant Commander Brown was the one to come into the lock to greet
them. He