from
above, which flashed alternate red and blue to identify them.

Time crawled slowly around the clock-face on the wall, the
sixty-five-second minutes of Uller dragging like hours. The spots that
marked the enemy ship and her hunters crawled, too; seen from the
hundred-and-fifty-mile altitude of the _Sky-Spy_, even the
six-hundred-mile speed of the _Gaucho_ was barely visible. They drank
coffee till the stuff revolted them; they smoked until their throats
and mouths were dry, they watched the screens until they thought that
they would see them in their dreams forever. Then the _Gaucho_
reported radar-contact with the Keegarkan ship, which had begun to
turn in a hairpin-shaped course and was coming south down the Konk
Valley.

After that, the _Gaucho_ began reporting directly, and her topside
identification-light went out.

"... doused our lights; we're down in the valley, altitude about a
thousand feet. We're trying to get a glimpse of her against the sky,"
a voice came in. "We're cutting in our forward TV-pickup." The voice
repeated, several times, the wavelength, and somebody got an auxiliary
screen tuned in. There was nothing visible on it but the darkness of
the valley, the star-jeweled sky, and the loom of the East Konk
Mountains. "We still can't see her, but we ought to, any moment; radar
shows her well above the mountains. Ah, there she is; she just
obscured Beta Hydrae V; she's moving toward that big constellation to
the east of it, the one they call Finnegan's Goat. Now she'll be right
in the center of the screen; we're going straight for her. We're going
to try to slow her down till the _Aldebaran_ can get here...."

The enemy ship was vaguely visible, now, becoming clearer in the
starlight. She was a Boer-class freighter, all right. Probably the
_Jan Smuts_; the _Oom Paul Kruger_ had last been reported at Bwork,
and there was little chance that she had slipped into Keegark since
the uprising had started. For all anybody knew, she could have been
destroyed in the fighting before the Bwork Residency fell.

"All right, we have her spotted; we're going to open up on her," the
voice from the _Gaucho_ announced. "She has two 90's to our one; we'll
try to disable them, first." The vision-screen lit with the indirect
glare of the gun-flash, and the image in it jiggled violently as the
ship shook to the recoil, then steadied again, with the enemy ship
visible in the middle of it, growing larger and larger as t