It came, that recall alarm, a half hour after the first. The men at Base One tumbled into the ships and ripped into the sky, Steve following the flight closely in his inspection ship. The whole crew went anxiously, cheerfully, for the recall alarm meant that the threatened ship might possibly be saved.
The flight from Base One arrived on the scene forty minutes after taking off. The ship was in subspace, ripping along without drive at three or four hundred times the speed of light, still encased in the warp.
But it was spacewarp held up and maintained by the conjunction of warp-planes forced edge to edge by surrounding Guardian ships. The rescue crew had gone to pick up the people who had flown the ship in life-craft; the swampers and barriers were sticking close to go to work if the har
