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ear. I read the telltales fast: It wasn't a whale or a clump of weed. The microphones had picked up another sonar. And the IFF filters had spotted it instantly as an enemy.
    I hit the TBS button—and prayed there was someone within range to hear: "Unidentified object, presumed Caodai, sighted at Grid Eight Eighty-Baker-Forty-Two." I read my co-ordinates off the autolog. "Object bearing fifty-five degrees from present position, range extreme, size unknown." That was it. If the sonar communicator got as far as someone who could hear—and if the understaffed, overworked squadron complement could spare a pair of ears to listen—then I might get reinforcements, possibly even in time to help.
    Until then it was up to me.
    I fed the coal to the screws and came about, tripping the safeties on the bow tubes. I had four tiny homing missiles to squander; any one of them, small as they were, would probably do the trick if they connected with anything smaller than a cruiser. And they would do their best to connect: Their seeker fuses could tune in on the sound of the enemy screws, the temperature of the enemy hull, the magnetic deflection of the enemy steel, all at once; and if one bearing differed from the other two, they would reject that one. They would do their best; but of course the Caodais would be doing theirs. Their noise-makers would be clattering up the water at acoustic-focal points hundreds of yards away; their "curtain" ports would be dropping thermal flares; their counter-magnet generators would be generating and killing magnetic fields stem and stern by unpredictable turns.
    Still—I had four missiles. One would be enough.
    I was closing in on them at maximum speed; trying hard to read the indications in the sonar. A little bright pip of light doesn't tell you much, but it got bigger and brighter, and it began to look like something a lot bigger than me.
    All of a sudden I was thinking of Elsie, fantastic thoughts: Suppose this Caodai, whatever he was, hit me; and suppose I got free and swam to the surface; and suppose they picked me up as a prisoner; and suppose they interned me; and suppose, just suppose, that I wound up on Zanzibar. . . .
    But then I had no time for fantasies. The big, bright splotch in the sonar plate shimmered and spattered into a cluster of dots. For a moment they wavered and tried to converge again—but it was a cluster, all right.
    One, two, three . . . I counted, and counted again. But the count didn't make much difference.
    I had four missiles, all right, but there were at least eight of them. They were corvettes at the least, by the size of them in the sonar screen. And I was a little thirty-foot torp, with four missiles to fight with. If I got a 4.0 hit with every one of them, that left only four to beat the dubbing out of me.
    What is a hero? I didn't feel heroic; I felt scared. But I didn't turn around and run for it either.
    They not only had the legs of me, they had the reach of me too. If I ran, they could catch me. If I attacked, they could pound me to pieces before I got within range. If I sat still and prayed, I would at least enhance my dubious prospects of getting to heaven, which would at any rate be something constructive so my last minutes on earth wouldn't be a total loss. But what I did was fight. It was habit and instinct and routine. Full speed forward, turn the navigation over to the auto-pilot. Cut the fire-control remotes in on missile Number One, discriminate, lock, arm, and fire. Cut in on Number Two, fire Number Two. Cut in on Number Three, fire Number Three. Cut in on Number Four, fire Number Four . . . and then it was time to cut and run.
    In fact, it was past time. They were on course for me and I was on course for them; we had closed to less than five thousand yards. By the time I came about, it was forty-five hundred; and a corvette can catch a scout torp with I a forty-five hundred yard lead in roughly twenty minutes, It is only a matter of relative speeds. Of