She disappeared again. Holmes settled himself comfortably. He was one
of those fortunate people who are able to relax at will. Actually, in
his work he normally did his thinking while on his feet, moving about
his yacht-building plant or else sailing one of his own boats. He
simply was not a sit-down thinker. Sitting, he could doze at almost any
time he pleased, and for a yachtsman it was a useful ability. He could
go for days on snatched catnaps when necessary. Conversely he could
catnap practically at will.
He yawned once or twice and settled down confidently. In five minutes
or less ...
* * * * *
_He wriggled down into an opening barely large enough to admit his
body. The top clamped and sealed overhead. He fitted his feet into
their proper stirrup-like holders and fixed his hands on the controls.
There was violent acceleration and he shot away and ahead. Behind him
the jagged shape of the fortress loomed. He swung his tiny ship. He
drove fiercely for the tiny rings of red glow which centered themselves
in the sighting-screen before him. He drove and drove, while the
fortress dwindled to a dot and then vanished._
_On either side of his ship a ten-foot steel globe clung. He checked
them over, tense with the realization that he must very soon be within
the practical timing-range of the new Enemy solid missiles. He made
minute adjustments in the settings of the globes._
_He released them together. They went swinging madly away at the
end of a hair-thin wire which would sustain the tons of stress that
centrifugal force gave the spheres. They spiraled toward darkness with
its background of innumerable stars. The Enemy would be puzzled, this
time! They'd developed missile-weapons with computing sights. In their
last attack, five hundred years before, the Enemy had been defeated by
the self-driving globes that had an utterly incredible acceleration.
It was reported from the Cathor sector that in this current attack
they had missile-weapons with a muzzle-velocity of hundreds of
miles per second, which could actually anticipate a globe with a
hundred-sixty-gravity drive. They could fire a solid shot to meet it
and knock it down, because of some incredible computer-system which was
able to calculate a globe's trajectory and meet it in space. They were
smart, the Enemy!_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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