The sky turned purple. It went black with specks of starshine in it. Hoddan swung to a westward course and continued to rise, watching the star-images as they shifted on the screens. The image of the sun, of course, was automatically diminished so that it was not dazzling. The rockets continued to roar, though in a minor fashion because there was no longer air outside in which a bellow could develop. * * * * * Hoddan painstakingly made use of those rule-of-thumb methods of astrogation which his piratical forebears had developed and which a boy on Zan absorbed without being aware. He wanted an orbit around Darth. He didn't want to take time to try to compute it. So he watched the star-images ahead and astern. If the stars ahead rose above the planet's edge faster than those behind sank down below it--he would be climbing. If the stars behind sank down faster than those ahead rose up--he would be descending. If all the stars rose equally he'd be climbing straight up, and if they all dropped equally he'd be moving straight down. It was not a complex method, and it worked. Presently he relaxed. He sped swiftly back past midday and toward the sunrise line on Darth. This was the reverse of a normal orbit, but it was the direction followed by the ships up here. He hoped his orbit was lower than theirs. If it was, he'd overtake them from behind. If he were higher, they'd overtake him. He turned on the space phone. Its reception-indicator was piously placed at "Ground." He shifted it to "Space," so that it would pick up 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--