It came, that recall alarm, a half hour after the first. The men at Base One tumbled into the ships and ripped into the sky, Steve following the flight closely in his inspection ship. The whole crew went anxiously, cheerfully, for the recall alarm meant that the threatened ship might possibly be saved. The flight from Base One arrived on the scene forty minutes after taking off. The ship was in subspace, ripping along without drive at three or four hundred times the speed of light, still encased in the warp. But it was spacewarp held up and maintained by the conjunction of warp-planes forced edge to edge by surrounding Guardian ships. The rescue crew had gone to pick up the people who had flown the ship in life-craft; the swampers and barriers were sticking close to go to work if the hard-held warp failed. A mishap on the part of one pilot holding the warp would fracture the englobement; this was as fatal to the life of the spacewarp as puncture is in the flank of a toy balloon. Base One's flight came swirling in and caught the orders from the Guardian director in charge. Base Seven was used up; every available ship for the job was holding the warp, it was Base One's job to enter the warp and close down on the generator room, to fasten tractors to the free-running ship and slow it down below the speed of light before the warp broke. As many as could latched onto the ship and applied their drives. The ship slowed and the warp-holding ships slowed with it, keeping their distance. It was tricky business, for there was just enough lack of spacial homogeneity to make the course a bit rough; it was somewhat like the job of running a fleet of vessels close together in a heavy sea. Then the rest of Base One's power ships came in to stand between Seven's warp-holding craft, and Base One's warp-planes went forth, entered the hull of the ship, and established a second englobed warp around the ruined generator. A third warp was thrown about the ship just outside of the second, and the whole crew took a deep breath. Now if one broke, the other would be there. They were safe; the ship was saved, could be repaired and put in service again. The tractors slowed the ship and eventually the whole fleet dropped below the velocity of light and their spacewarp generators thrummed down to a growling halt. The galaxy changed in color as the ships entered prime space and the light of the stars was the real light that mankind had always seen instead of the unreal glow caused by the central energies of the suns of the universe. For space itself is warped naturally in the core of a sun, and the energy glows through a subspace populated only by the phantom cores of prime space stars--and the few puny bits of sentient brain that warped space artificially. Technicians breached the ship with their kits of tools to make repair as the Guardians broke up their pattern and began the trip back to their bases.