"No. I'd rather have full coverage. I think the noseys are laying for us, and I want something that'll affect every Eglan in range, not just part of them. If we confuse them enough we can crack straight through before they recover." "What do you intend to use to cause this confusion?" Sandoval asked. A grin crossed Fiske's face. "We might put a signalman on the mike and give them the latest box scores in the Tri World league mixed with double talk. Or our linguist could issue phoney orders in Eglanese." Sandoval grinned in answer. "Sneaky, isn't it?--this business of hoisting the engineers on their own petards. Personally, I favor music--some of these squirm combos the boys listen to would drive a saint out of Heaven." Fiske chuckled. "It's an idea--and not a bad one at that. Angelo Bordoni in the signal section has some progressive squirm recordings that'd make your hair curl. We'll make him a disk jockey as soon as we have some Eglani to try it on." "You won't have to wait long, sir," Pedersen said, as he swivelled his chair to face Fiske. "Detectors report a disturbance in C-green about ten hours ahead. Looks like a couple of class one cruisers. Not ours." "What's their bearing?" "They're moving along our line slightly under our component." Fiske leaned back in his chair, a thoughtful expression on his face. He looked at Pedersen and nodded. "Battle Stations, condition two," Pedersen said to the talker. "Well, there's two of them down there to try your gadget on." "Gives us one break at least," Fiske said. "We're not too outnumbered." Pedersen shrugged off the pun. "In your shoes, sir," he said, "I'd be tempted to run like hell." "Sure, so am I. But just where could we get a better chance than this? If we're going to fight we might as well get decent odds." "You call two to one decent?" "I'll tell you more when their drive patterns are analyzed. If they're cruisers we can outgun and outrun them,--and if they're battlewagons they'll never catch us. Not even--" "Objects register as enemy heavy cruisers," the talker said. "Drive intensity point oh two over ours." "Well," Pedersen remarked. "You're wrong on one point. We're not going to outrun them." "Seems that way," Fiske agreed. "They must be new models,--probably ones like those that chewed up Ed Albertson's ship. But they can't be any more heavily armed than we are." "Maybe not, but there's two of them," Pedersen said drily. "I would imagine this changes things." "Naturally. We'll run for awhile. I'm not risking my ship against those odds if I can help it." Fiske turned on the command circuit. "One eighty gyro turn," he said. "Execute!"