2/ WANTED: AN ARKONIDE CONTACT

 

Under dateline of 5 Oct. 2042, an announcement appeared in the Terrania Times, an independent tabloid:

With reference to the Daily News article of Oct. 3 concerning the escape of 3 deserters from the Myrtha 7 Fleet Base, our informants have learned that Solar Administrator Rhodan is presently on Myrtha 7 and that the incident in question turns out to be a matter of high priority concern. Apparently the situation created by the theft of the Gazelle class scoutship is considered to be so serious that it has occasioned the imposition of a news blackout at the base. This appears to indicate that from now on the public may expect to have only the synthetic reassurances of the Ministry of Information dished out to them.

Our own opinion of the situation is that if we are actually endangered then Earthmen and all inhabitants of the Solar Empire should be considered sufficiently stable to be able to face such a threat openly. The practice of releasing obviously false and security-edited bulletins to the world should be avoided. This kind of information only breeds distrust and creates confusion precisely when the danger presents itself in spite of all attempts at concealment and at the moment when everything depends on a full and clear understanding.

 

* * * *

 

The man who stood in the bulkhead hatchway of the control room was Ronson Lauer. Gunther Chellish knew that his game was up.

Slowly his habit of cool deliberation returned to him.

He looked from Lauer to Suttney, who still stood next to his chair, and suddenly Suttney’s strategy became clear to him. Suttney knew that he would try to resist doing whatever was asked of him. But the man also knew that Chellish would be relying on his and Roane’s inexperience in matters of galactic navigation and would count on being able to fool them about the course of the Gazelle instead of offering resistance to two armed men while he himself was unarmed. So Suttney had kept Lauer in the background so that the takeoff could proceed without friction of any kind. At the right moment he had presented him in order to convince Chellish he’d have to stop fooling around.

For Ronson Lauer would be sitting right next to him when he worked out the coördinates for the next hyperjump. And Lauer was not a man who could be taken in by any navigation trickery.

"Alright, you heard what Suttney wants you to do," he said by way of opening their relationship. "Turn on the stellar scan and pick out a sector where we’ll be safe. Move! What are you waiting for?"

Ronson Lauer was a small man with a ferret-like shiftiness and quickness about him. Chellish could not place his age easily, figuring it to be somewhere between 30 and 50. He appeared to be a bit boisterous and with a certain capacity for humour but there was a flavour to it that didn’t quite set well with Chellish.

He decided to ignore Lauer’s orders and to centre on Suttney as the responsible spokesman of the group. He looked at Suttney questioningly.

"That’s right," Suttney nodded, "we can’t lose any time. Start working out the data for the next jump. You’ve got an assistant now…" He indicated Lauer. "So you should be able to speed things up. Right?"

Chellish did not feel obliged to answer. He turned his seat back to the flight console and pressed a readout select button. The intercom screen over the panel began to flicker. While the readout screen was warming up, he took the time necessary to scan his flight instruments.

Relative to Myrtha the Gazelle was moving along at 900 miles per second. The course veered radically away from the Myrtha System. Within a circumference of 10 light-years there was no object of sufficient mass to even get a rise out of the proximity sensor. According to a not too exact parallax measurement, the nearest star was about 3 light-years away.

Meanwhile the title page of the Galacticatalogue had appeared on the readout screen. Chellish turned once more to Suttney. "Don’t you have any definite spot in mind at all? Where am I supposed to transit to?"

When Suttney glanced at Lauer again, the latter shrugged his shoulders carelessly. "More or less up for grabs, I’d say. Main thing is, don’t put us in a hot spot. Give any Earth spaceships a wide berth. I’d suggest somewhere in the centre of the galaxy."

Chellish nodded. He pulled the readout terminal board closer to him, which with its button rows of numbers and letters was reminiscent of a desk calculator. He depressed a series of the buttons and then activated a red switch. The title page of the catalogue disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by another. It consisted principally of a dizzying mass of points, ciphers and letters. Between individual points, lines had been drawn in, most of them dotted. A heading on the upper edge read: General Index Map, Sector 10000-12000 parsecs, Theta 0–1°, Phi 89-90°.

"Good!" Lauer spontaneously. "That’s just the bailiwick! Look at the breakdown sheet on parsecs 11000 to 11100, Theta 0–0, 10 minutes, Phi 89° 50 minutes to 90°."

Chellish complied. Skilfully he fed the instructions into the terminal board and then switched on the data retrieval button. A few moments later a new index map appeared on the readout screen which showed the heading Lauer had called for. Chellish noted that outside of a white background and the black points and lines the map did not contain any other colours. This made him feel more insecure than ever. The region Lauer had selected was not under anybody’s control or influence. It seemed as though these 3 deserters actually wanted to search out some inconspicuous spot where they could spend the rest of their lives without being disturbed by anybody.

He stared at the screen and waited for Lauer to say something. His eyes wandered over the numbers marked alongside the black dots representing the stars without actually reading them, since he was held in suspense as to which of these 2000 or so points Lauer would decide on.

The Galacticatalogue was an Arkonide product as were all star catalogues used in Terranian space navigation. More than 10,000 years had been necessary to create an Atlas of this magnitude and degree of comprehensiveness. Thousands of registry ships had been involved in gathering all this stellar information.

Of course this didn’t mean that the catalogue contained all the stars in the galaxy. Experts on Earth had estimated the work to be abut 75 or 80% complete but actually only about 7% of the stars listed had ever been visited. The rest had been indicated by numbers and letters, which was quite sufficient for galactonautics officers to find their way around.

Terra had reproduced the Arkonide catalogues in their entirety, retaining the Arkonide names and converting only the linear and angular measurements in order not to have to also assimilate Arkonide mathematics. The unit of distance was the parallax-second, abbreviated parsec, and the unit of angular distance was the degree of arc. The point of origin of the coordinate system that was the basis of the catalogue was Arkon. Various people on Earth had taken the view that this should be changed. As a rising new power, Terra should not have to use a catalogue that had Arkon as its central reference. Basically it would not be a difficult task to convert all the catalogue values using Terra as a new central reference but it would represent a tremendous investment in computer time.

But the actual reason in favour of keeping Arkon as the coordinate centre had been quite something else. If the Solar Empire was to continue to develop without interruption, Terra’s galactic position had to remain secret. In view of the many and varied means that were at the disposal of the potential enemy, maintaining this particular secret was no mean task. It required a great deal of costly and tedious preparations and precautions. In fact it would have been completely insurmountable if there were catalogues showing the Earth or rather the Terran sun as a central point of the coördinates. Anybody wishing to discover the galactic position of the Earth then would only have to compare a few entries of the Arkonide catalogue with equivalent entries in the Earth catalogue. So it was that Arkon had been kept the centre of coördinates.

The coordinate system was spherically symmetrical. The radius vector gave the distance of the object from the coordinate origin, that is Arkon, in parsecs. The angle formed between the radius vector and the vertical axis was Theta, and that formed with the horizontal axis was Phi. The system was so standardized that the centre of the galaxy lay at coördinates Theta 90° and Phi 0°. The length of the radical vector to the centre point amounted to 10936 parsecs.

The individual data cards or sheets of the catalogue represented galactic sectors and they were selected in such a manner as to be nearly all equal in terms of cubic space covered. Since the microfilm record of these sheets was necessarily 2-dimensional, the altitude or distance of individual stars above or below the film surface was again designated by parsec measurements.

The star points were accompanied by still other markings which were the coördinates used for fixing a stellar position in hyperspace. These added coördinates were transferred by a constant conversion factor into energy units that a propulsion system would have to yield for a spaceship to reach a specific star via transition, that is by means of a hyperjump. So these latter were closely related to what were referred to as ‘jump data’ in the jargon of the galactonauts.

Meanwhile, Ronson Lauer had made his decision. He reached for the terminal control set which looked so much like a calculator. Turning a small thumbwheel, he brought one of the 2000 stars to the centre of the viewscreen. When the black dot representing the star reached the cross-hair lines, Lauer pressed another button which caused the displayed field of vision to be magnified. Now the almost microscopic data near the selected star became readable.

"That one," said Lauer tersely. "A Sol-type—just the right one for us."

Chellish noted that Lauer turned toward Suttney. "Whatever you think," agreed the latter with a nod.

Lauer gestured carelessly at the viewscreen. "So start your calculations, Chellish," he ordered. "You know, of course, how it works: parsec differential between our location and the point of destination; the ship’s mass, and energy conversion of the catalogue data. So move it, will you? What are you waiting for?"

Chellish realized that Lauer wanted to show off his knowledge to him but since it was relatively schoolboy routine he regarded the demonstration as somewhat ridiculous. As he initiated the calculations somewhat mechanically and absently, his mind was on the 3 deserters who had stolen a Gazelle and he wondered what business they had snooping around in the vicinity of a nameless sun that was 7500 parsecs or about 25000 light years distant and where neither Terranians nor Arkonides had ever ventured before.

For the present he didn’t have the slightest idea…

 

* * * *

 

"It’s perfectly clear what we have to do," explained Perry Rhodan. "We have to search for the missing Gazelle. It must be found before those three succeed in causing us trouble. I’m counting on their uncertainty, though, to make them trip themselves up sooner or later so we can track them down. And I’m also relying on 1st Lt. Chellish, in case he’s still alive. He’ll find a way to give us some kind of a signal."

"At the moment there is nothing more important than the search for that ship. We still have a number of months yet before the expected overlap of the two time planes, so we don’t have to hurry ourselves in that regard. We can call up the entire fleet to look for the Gazelle."

"And as for the 20,000 micro-technologists of the Swoon race now living on Earth, we can give them the job of developing a piece of equipment that will make it possible to trace a ship in transition in spite of its built-in resonance frequency absorber."

He remained silent for awhile and then began to smile. "It turns out that our highly celebrated invention of the absorber is working to our disadvantage here. We’ve installed an apparatus on board the stolen craft that now makes it impossible for us to find a trace of it. So we have to develop a weapon to counter our own weapon in order to extricate ourselves from this dilemma!"

He paused a second time to glance along the row of officers who were seated before him, until his gaze rested on Lt.-Col. Sikerman. "I’ll have to requisition a lot of your men, Sikerman," he continued. "The ships stationed on Grautier must be fully manned. Meanwhile, you will continue constructing the base. But don’t think for one moment that the importance of your work here has diminished—you keep it rolling!"

Then his gaze wandered to Maj. Van Aafen, or ‘Teldje’ as he was known to his men. "Van Aafen, I want you to make a flight to Earth. You will be given written notes and instructions which will inform Marshal Freyt concerning the situation here. You are hereby commissioned to hand the pertinent documents personally to the Marshal. A cruiser will be placed at your disposal as a courier ship."

As van Aafen acknowledged the assignment with a nod of his head, Rhodan fixed his gaze on the man next to him, Capt. Aurin. "You get the main spotlight, Aurin," he said. "You’re going to be the one to send out the Fleet alarm. You will get your forming up and deployment instructions in… say 40 minutes. In the meantime you’d better make the necessary preparations."

Rodes Aurin stood up, saluted and exited.

"That is all, gentlemen," Rhodan concluded. "I thank you!"

Instantly there was a scraping of chairs and a shuffling of feet and within seconds after Perry Rhodan had uttered his final word the small briefing chamber was empty.

A mighty force was set in motion. The Earth prepared to protect its secret, arming itself against an enemy who would strike as soon as he discovered where the Earth was located. Earth prepared to demonstrate its power—a power which had been created in less than 70 years and yet dared to compete with that of the 10,000-year-old Empire of Arkon.

 

* * * *

 

They had left him alone with Oliver Roane. They had also disconnected the intercom so that from the pilot’s position he would not be able to know what was going on. Suttney had told him to go into the transition within one half hour and Chellish would have given his eye teeth to know what Suttney and Ronson Lauer would be up to during that time. But under the circumstances there was no possibility of finding out.

Oliver Roane sat behind him, more or less in the centre of the control room, and still held the pistol in his hand, the barrel of which was aimed unwaveringly at his back. The control panel of the telecom transceiver equipment lay within easy reach of Roane but not himself. Chellish closed his eyes and mentally reviewed the switch settings necessary to make the transmitter beam out a trace signal. There were only two: turning on the main power switch that would put the transmitter ‘on the air’, and hitting the code button which would feed in a prepared I.D. trace to the transmitter. That was all. It was a move that a practiced technician could accomplish in half a second.

But even if it had only required a hundredth of a second and only one switch, Chellish could not have manoeuvred it. Roane was fully alert and he had twice demonstrated already how swiftly he could react.

Gunther Chellish found himself trapped in a condition of unalleviated frenzy.

He began to fool with the flight console board. Before leaving the room, Ronson Lauer had looked it over carefully and explained to the others that Chellish could not get into any mischief with it. After the jump data had been fed to the propulsion section, the main release lever for the hypertransition had been electrically blocked with a time relay. It would only release when the prescribed half hour was up.

So Oliver Roane took no particular exception to Chellish’s handling of the controls. Out of boredom he turned back to the stellar catalogue and reexamined the visual readout concerning their target star. When he saw that the data here were equally boring, he switched to the adjacent sector sheet.

This area was partially coloured in yellow, which meant that this part of the galaxy lay within an Arkonide realm of influence. The yellow portion penetrated the displayed star sheet like an inundation, spreading from the right-hand edge to the middle of the screen. Chellish switched on the sectional magnification and observed the star points’ names and navigational data.

They all had names in Arkonide spheres of influence. Chellish read Galtha, Oone, Sophrun, Lowaun, Hayireko, Minnit and a number of others he had never heard of before. He fell to daydreaming, wondering what the planets of these suns might look like and what kind of creatures might he living there.

But as he continued to turn the selector on the terminal board the magnified readout section wandered upward and beyond the yellow-hued part of the microfilmed catalogue sheet. Here the star names were less frequent. Outside their own area of responsibility the Arkonides had not taken the trouble to name the stars. Chellish read: Naaiwoon, Joplat, Hoshan, then a nameless stretch for several centimetres, followed by: Latin-Oor.

It startled him. Latin-Oor. This name he had heard mentioned once and not too long ago. In what connection was it?

Latin-Oor. He brainstormed, pushing his memory for a clue. The name had sounded like ‘Latin ore’ when he first heard it. He traced this back in his thoughts. Ore. He remembered having wondered if there really were any ‘ore’ on Latin-Oor, although of course the Arkonide name bore no relationship to Chellish’s translation. He had thought that if there were any valuable minerals on Latin-Oor it could be made into a military base, if only… if…

That was it! If only the Arkonide robot fleet didn’t turn the planet into a blazing Inferno—because that’s where they were headed!

Suddenly the picture came to him clearly. He had attended a training class with a number of other officers and had learned through the internal Fleet news service that Maj. Clyde Ostal had succeeded in planting a false clue with the Arkonide Robot Brain which had led the enemy to believe that the Earth was to be found somewhere in the centre of the galaxy. Latin-Oor was the sun containing in its system the planet which was playing the role of Earth, per Ostal’s falsified information. According to the catalogue, Latin-Oor possessed two Earthlike worlds, both of which, however, were uninhabited. The robot Regent must suspect that one of them was the Earth.

So Clyde Ostal’s operation had worked out as planned. The Regent had swallowed the bait and dispatched a huge fleet Chellish couldn’t recall which of the two planets the information furnished by Ostal had pinpointed, whether Latin-Oor 3 or Latin-Oor 4, but he was sure that the robot fleet would surround one of them and demand of its inhabitants an unconditional surrender. In the officer class at the time they had all laughed heartily when they imagined the Arkonide fleet making a landing after receiving no response to their demands and finding out that there was no intelligent life on either Latin-Oor 3 or 4; and they had wondered whether or not the shock might be enough to blow a few tubes and fuses in the robot Regent’s innards.

And now? As to the robot fleet heading for Latin-Oor, what did it have to do with him and his present situation?

Chellish went back in the catalogue and compared the data pertaining to Ronson Lauer’s star with those related to Latin-Oor. Lauer’s chosen destination, by extrapolation, lay just above the plane of the microfilm, whereas Latin-Oor was elevated over its own film plane to such an extent that it almost reached into the previous sheet’s area. Lauer’s target star was in an angular area of Theta 89:50 to 90:00. An intervening sheet inclosed the area of Theta 90:00 to 90:10, and next to this came the Latin-Oor sheet, embracing the angular area, Theta 90:10 to 90:20. The vertical distance between the two suns was not greater than 10 light-years. Since the horizontal or Phi values were at some variance, the total distance amounted to something like 16 light-years, or 5 parsecs.

Suddenly, scales seemed to fall away from Chellish’s eyes. He remembered what Lauer had answered to his question, as to whether or not they had any definite goal in mind:

"…Main thing is, don’t put us in a hotspot. Give any Earth spaceships a wide berth…"

That was it. Earth spaceships were to be avoided. He should have realized sooner that Lauer had emphasized the word.

On the other hand, Arkonide ships would not be objectionable. On the contrary, Lauer had studied the catalogue beforehand and was aware of the fact that his target star was only 16 light-years away from Latin-Oor. This is why he had chosen it, because he wanted Arkonide ships nearby when Suttney was ready to carry out his intentions.

There could be no further doubt as to what those intentions were. Suttney was looking for an Arkonide contact. On the other hand the Arkonides wouldn’t want anything to do with him—for fear of complication—unless he brought them something that would make the risk worthwhile.

The position of the Earth!

Gunther Chellish needed no intercom now to tell him where Lauer and Suttney were at the moment or what they were doing there. They were in the computer bank room and were no doubt raking through the data stored there in order to figure out the galactic coördinates for the Earth. That was not a simple task. As a result of security measures, the Earth’s position data were not retained in any such memory registers. Even in the Galacticatalogue there was no sun to be found anywhere designated as Sol. But of course it was possible to arrive at Earth’s location by making use of coördinates related to neighbouring stars. For that, however, a very complete knowledge of astronomy was necessary. Chellish didn’t doubt that Lauer had such knowledge but he was not skilled in the interpolation of position data and even if he himself were armed with all figures and factors affecting Earth’s neighbouring stars he would still need several hours in which to work out a program for the positronicon.

Chellish began to figure out how much time he had. An hour and a half maybe for them to get their data and still another 3 hours for the program to be set up. The rest would run off in a few seconds; the computer handled such items swiftly.

So it would be 4½ hours altogether—that is if Suttney decided to send out the position data at random instead of first making contact with the Arkonide ships. If he were going to wait for the arrival of the Arkonides, another couple of hours would be involved. Perhaps 4 or 5 hours.

Taken altogether, this was quite a bit of time, but in spite of it Chellish began to get nervous. He had to figure out something he could do to thwart Suttney’s plans. He had to let the men on Grautier know where the stolen Gazelle was located but he didn’t know how he might contrive to do it. Four and a half hours or still more hours were not much time in which to come up with a really effective idea.

He turned to look at Roane. Oliver Roane still sat in the same position as though the gun had taken root in his hand and he stared at him somewhat stupidly. Chellish smiled but Roane’s face remained unchanged.

"Aren’t you afraid, Roane?" he asked.

His thoughts were not organized yet. He had to think of something that would throw a monkey wrench into Suttney’s calculations and he had the curious impression that his mind would work better if he had somebody to talk to in the process.

"Of you, maybe?" growled Roane.

"No. Of being caught and shot."

There was a troubled expression on Roane’s face when he registered what Chellish meant.

"Don’t be an idiot!" he answered gruffly. "Nobody’s going to catch us."

The theory worked. Chellish felt his wits revving up swiftly. "Do you think it’s right, what Suttney has in mind?" he asked while his grey matter began belabouring a new idea.

In his slow-witted way, Roane laughed suspiciously. "Don’t poke around, Chellish. You’re just pumping me for information. You don’t know a thing about what Suttney has in mind."

Lord!—thought Chellish. He’s slow as an ox! "Why of course I know what he plans to do!" he insisted.

Roane guffawed somewhat ponderously.

Chellish kept a straight face while acting extremely serious. "I’ll tell you what he’s planning," he said. "He plans to set us down on an unknown planet and subjugate the primitive people there. What else would he be thinking of?"

Roane’s heavy-lidded eyes opened wide, fairly threatening to pop out of his head. He leaned forward and stared at Chellish incredulously. It took him a few seconds to register what Chellish had said, during which Chellish figured that if his idea wasn’t exactly ingenious it was at least worth a try.

Oliver Roane started to laugh then. He fairly shook with laughter over Chellish’s apparent stupidity and the control room rang with the booming echoes. Chellish grasped the opportunity by swinging about in his seat and swiftly manipulating two closely-spaced controls nearby.

Roane caught the swift movement. He interrupted his laughter abruptly and narrowed an eye at Chellish suspiciously. He came to his feet. "What did you do just then?"

"Nothing special," Chellish answered casually. "I just turned up the air-conditioning slightly. It’s getting a bit too hot in here for me."

 

* * * *

 

In the ship’s computer, circuit card 225 was the impulse distributor for control stage 17. This was a part of the standard circuitry connecting the hyper-compensator with the hyper-drive section of the propulsion units. The integrated circuit board was normally designed for handling precisely formed triangular pulses having a 3-volt positive amplitude and a base time ranging from 5 to 100 microseconds. It could only process this kind of input, which consisted of classification sorting and distributing the outputs through the 20 output channels which it served.

There was just one exception built into the circuit logic whereby another type of impulse could be processed. It would also accept a sequence of square-wave pulses having a 10-volt positive amplitude and durations of 10 microseconds. This was the so-called emergency-pulse signal which became memory-stored rather than broken down and distributed and thus caused all 20 output channels to be blocked. But in order for card 225 to be able to receive an emergency pulse train of this nature it was necessary for a change of potential to open a special threshold-gate on the input side.

In this instance the emergency pulses arrived at the input without the necessary voltage change in the gating circuit. Distributor card 225 refused to accept it, obeying its built-in safety logic against operational errors, which could be electronically dangerous. During a short timespan of fractions of a second the threshold-gate finally received its required potential change and so the distributor circuit had no other recourse than to accept the high-tension jolt internally. Unfortunately, this was a reverse sequence of events for which it was not designed. It had no time to block off the 20 output channels. The built-up square-wave impulses raced into these channels before circuit 225 could react.

Some of the equipment connected to the 20 output leads remained unaffected by the impulses since the latter had been somewhat attenuated. For example, when they reached the control mechanism of the hyper-compensator they were virtually in a ‘dead’ circuit because the compensator had been safety-blocked by another security gate. However, there were a few places where some chaotic reactions could occur—especially in highly inductive circuits. In spite of attenuation through the output distribution, the impulses were still 5 times in excess of what the standard circuit channels were designed for and thus 5 times the normal self-induction was generated. As a result, a certain coil mounted on plastic foil became partially melted down.

From there on the control connection was interrupted. Of course this was only in one particular location but since this circuit was at a highly critical point the break was sufficient to put the entire control stage 17 out of commission.

 

* * * *

 

Oliver Roane was suspicious. Chellish observed that he was struggling mentally over what he should do in this case.

"No kidding—just the air-conditioner?" he asked almost stupidly.

Chellish nodded.

Roane still couldn’t make up his mind. It was obvious to him that he should report the incident to Suttney but in that case he’d have to leave the control room since the intercom had been disconnected.

Roane looked around uncertainly, trying to see if he could detect a change in the air-conditioning. But it was still just as warm in the room as ever.

Meanwhile, Chellish had turned back again to the console with his back to Roane, apparently unconcerned. Roane finally shrugged, thinking that he’d simply have to report it to Suttney when he returned.

But Chellish was staring at the little back-lighted instruction plate under two coloured switch buttons. It blinked at him with the following message:

ERROR—DISTR H-COMP SECTION—SHUTDOWN REQUIRED—SIMULTANEOUS ACTIVATION BOTH SWITCHES

This he had not done. He had activated the one on the left first and then the one on the right. He knew there was a circuit failure in the indicated area of the control system but he still didn’t know what the effect of his erroneous operation of the buttons might be.

 

* * * *

 

The Terranian fleet was under way. The major vessels formed a widely deployed net but the space between them was tightened up by the Gazelles and Guppy-type auxiliary craft belonging to the larger ships. Gen. Deringhouse, a rejuvenated veteran from the beginning days of the Solar Empire, led the massive manoeuvre from his command station on board the Barbarossa, a superbattleship of the Empire class. There was only one ship that was not subject to Deringhouse’s commands. This was the Drusus, a late model ship of the same class, which was the flagship of the fleet under command of Perry Rhodan himself.

The plan governing the search action had been worked out by the mathematicians. It involved a series of possibilities and variables on the basis of which the first trace of the lost Gazelle might be discovered. A 24-hour schedule of uninterrupted operation was assigned to all equipment which was capable of any kind of detection: visual observation, electronic search, detection of energy sources, fuel residue tracing and analysis, and detection of any space warpages in the Einstein continuum.

One thing seemed to be impossible: that the missing scoutship would ever be detectable as a result of a transition space warp. Each transition produced an energy shock-wave. Although the energy thus released was of a complex nature in itself, its propagation followed the relatively simple laws of the 5th-dimensional continuum. Hypersensor equipment was capable of detecting such emanations at almost any distance from the area of the transition. Unless, of course, the hyper-transiting spacecraft possessed a hyper-compensator, which trapped the shock-wave energy in a specially generated ‘cavity’ where it expended itself in such a manner that nothing—or at least almost nothing—could escape into normal space. In which case there was nothing left for the tracking sensors but the residual fields, which were about 10,000 times weaker than the actual shock-wave itself. Nevertheless, these residual vibrations combined with resonant factors of a compensator served to propagate a pattern of faint energy which was unique to each individual vessel, known as the resonance frequency. The only equipment that could detect these faint residual fields were the high-precision sensors developed by the Swoon, the race of micro-technologists. However, a spaceship in transition could also render these residual fields ineffective if it also possessed a frequency absorber, also known as a ‘damper’. This equipment was capable of absorbing even the residual field energies so that not the slightest trace of the transition was left for sensing equipment located anywhere in normal space.

The Gazelle in question happened to have both of these pieces of equipment: the hyper-compensator and the frequency absorber. If anybody hoped to detect any space warpages or transition shock-waves generated by the stolen scoutship they would have to believe in miracles.

But there was the glimmer of just such a hope in the mind of Perry Rhodan. Because if 1st Lt. Chellish were still alive there was a chance of things happening for which there was no accounting in the normal, predictable course of the search.