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want to give him eight hours’ warning. He’d see our warp all the way in.”
    “He wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, though,” counters Korie. “His engines are blown. Your way would only give him time to fix them.”
    “We don’t know that his engines are blown,” corrects Brandt. “And if we can fix our engines in the next eight hours, then maybe he can do the same with his. Whatever the trouble is, with eight hours warning, he would certainly be able to jury-rig something. Don’t forget, we stopped because we had to. He stopped voluntarily. Your way , Mr. Korie, we stand a very good chance of picking up the chase right where we left off— ina stalemate . On the other hand, as it is now, he can’t see us at all, any more than we can see him—let’s keep it that way as long as we can and maybe we can get in close enough to attack.”
    The first officer is forced to agree; he nods reluctantly.
    The captain turns to his astrogator again. “Now. Can you do it, Al?”
    Barak frowns distastefully. It is obvious that he’d much rather do it Korie’s way, but he just grimaces and says, “Probably . . . he must be watching for us pretty closely, but we could do it by keeping our warp speed low. The smaller our stress-field disturbance, the closer we can get to him before he can pick us up; but he is fifty-five light days away, Captain, and the slower we go means the longer we take getting there—and more chance he has to escape.”
    Brandt nods warily. “But you can do it. . . ?”
    Barak shrugs. “Well, we might try to come in as close as we can without getting picked up on his scopes—then when we’re too close to avoid it, we could come down on top of him as fast as we could. Within a certain limit he will pick us up, but this would minimize his warning.”
    “And we could come in from an angle that he won’t be expecting us from,” suggests Korie. “It might throw him off balance.”
    “For a bit, anyway,” qualifies Brandt. “But it’s not a bad idea.”
    Barak shoots Korie a mock-sour look. “That’s right; make it harder for me. That means we’ll have to sneak past his sphere of influence in order to come back downinto it—that’s like trying to graze a billiard ball from three miles away, bounce off the side board, and hit it square on the ricochet.”
    “What you’re trying to say then is that you can’t do it?” asks Brandt.
    “Oh, I can do it all right. I just don’t like it.”
    “You don’t have to like it. All you have to do is do it. And if we’re going after him at all, that course has to be ready and set up to go by the time repairs are finished.”
    “Aye, aye.” Barak turns back to his board and his assistant. Brandt hits the chair arm and swivels forward. Korie steps out of his way as the chair swings around.
    Ahead, on the screen dominating the forward wall of the bridge, the two space-suited figures have dismantled a large section of the hull at the base of the number two grid. The screen blinks to show a close-up of their work as seen by the helmet camera. Currently, they are checking individual black box components. One of the men is touching a sensor to various key points of the systems analysis network. In theory it should have already pinpointed the location of the malfunction, but so much new equipment and refittings have been added to the Burlingame since she was commissioned that the system has long since collapsed in its own complexity. Now, a malfunction in any part of the ship requires an additional on-the-spot check of the secondary analysis units. The second crewman has plugged into one of these units with a portable scanner. It is a flat plastic device and he watches the readings on it carefully while the other continues to probe.
    Brandt glances right, at Korie’s brooding shape. “What’s your guess, Mr. Korie?”
    Korie hesitates for a beat. “Multiplex adapter.”
    The captain weighs this possibility. “Hm, maybe.”
    A second