"Get me Navigations.... Figure best point of rendezvous for the _Dauntless_ and Flotilla ZKD, both at full blast, en route to Lundmark's Nebula. Fifteen minutes departure. Figure approximate time of meeting with speedster, also at full blast, leaving that nebula hour nine fourteen today. Correction! Cancel speedster meeting; we can compute that more accurately later. Advise adjutant. Vice-Admiral Southworth will send order, through channels. Get me Base Hospital.... Lacy, please.... Kinnison's hurt, sawbones, bad. I'm going out after him. Coming along?" "Yes. How about--" "On the green. Flotilla ZKD, including your new two-hundred-million-credit hospital, is going along. Slip twelve, _Dauntless_, eleven and one half minutes from now. Hipe!" And the surgeon general "hiped." Two minutes before the scheduled take-off Base Navigations called the chief navigating officer of the _Dauntless_. "Course to rendezvous with Flotilla ZKD latitude three fifty-four dash thirty longitude nineteen dash forty-two time approximately twelve dash seven dash twenty-six place one dash three dash oh outside arbitrary galactic rim check and repeat," rattled from the speaker without pause or punctuation. Nevertheless, the chief navigator got it, recorded it, checked and repeated it. "Figures only approximations because of lack of exact data on variations in density of medium and on distance necessarily lost in detouring stars," the speaker chattered on. "Suggest instructing your second navigator to communicate with navigating officers Flotilla ZKD at time twelve dash oh dash oh to correct courses to compensate unavoidably erroneous assumptions in computation Base Navigations off." "I'll say he's off--'way off!" growled the second. "What does he think I am--a complete nitwit? Pretty soon he'll be telling me that two plus two equals four point oh." * * * * * The fifteen-second warning bell sounded. Every man came to the ready at his post, and precisely upon the designated second the superdreadnought blasted off. For six miles she rose inert upon her under jets, sirens and flaring lights clearing her way. Then she went free, her needle prow slanted sharply upward, her full battery of main driving projectors burst into action, and to all intents and purposes she vanished. The Earth fell away from her at an incredible rate, dwindling away into invisibility in less than a minute. In two minutes the Sun itself was merely a bright star, in five it had merged indistinguishably into the sharply defined, brilliantly white belt of the Milky Way.