A small gong tapped three times. An object nearby, something with real gravity, not the immaterial, cosmic ray generated pseudogravity that made up the etheric weather waves. Sam clicked on the periscope elements of the side toward it and brought its image onto the visiplate. It was a small ship, about ten miles to port, bucking heavily, as if tossed by enormous walls of palpable fluid. From her tail a narrowing streak of brilliance stabbed, only to be pinched surprisingly to a sharp point a few miles astern of her.
The brilliance of the exhaust bore witness to the recklessness with which her master was squandering fuel. Its constriction from the ordinary flare of rocket exhaust was eloquent of the all-pervading tendency to self-compression. Pressure everywhere were high by then, even the
