screens until they thought that
they would see them in their dreams forever. Then the _Gaucho_
reported radar-contact with the Keegarkan ship, which had begun to
turn in a hairpin-shaped course and was coming south down the Konk
Valley.

After that, the _Gaucho_ began reporting directly, and her topside
identification-light went out.

"... doused our lights; we're down in the valley, altitude about a
thousand feet. We're trying to get a glimpse of her against the sky,"
a voice came in. "We're cutting in our forward TV-pick-up." The voice
repeated, several times, the wavelength, and somebody got an auxiliary
screen tuned in. There was nothing visible in it but the darkness of
the valley, the star-jeweled sky, and the loom of the East Konk
Mountains. "We still can't see her, but we ought to, any moment; radar
shows her well above the mountains. Ah, there she is; she just
obscured Beta Hydrae V; she's moving toward that big constellation to
the east of it, the one they call Finnegan's Goat. Now she'll be right
in the center of the screen; we're going straight for her. We're going
to try to slow her down till _Aldebaran_ can get here...."

The enemy ship was vaguely visible, now, becoming clearer in the
starlight. She was a Boer-class freighter, all right. Probably the
_Jan Smuts_; the _Oom Paul Kruger_ had last been reported at Bwork,
and there was little chance that she had slipped into Keegark since
the uprising had started. For all anybody knew, she could have been
destroyed in the fighting before the Bwork Residency fell.

"All right, we have her spotted; we're going to open up on her," the
voice from the _Gaucho_ announced. "She has two 90's to our one; we'll
try to disable them, first." The vision-screen lit with the indirect
glare of the gun-flash, and the image in it jiggled violently as the
ship shook to the recoil, then steadied again, with the enemy ship
visible in the middle of it, growing larger and larger as the _Gaucho_
rushed toward her. The gun fired again and again, flooding the screen
with momentary yellow light and disturbing the image as the recoil
shook the gun-cutter. The enemy ship began firing in reply; the shots
were all wide misses. Apparently the geek gun-crew didn't know how to
synchronize the radar sights, and were ignorant of the correct setting
for the proximity-fuzes. The _Gaucho's_ searchlights came on, bathing
her quarry in light. It was the _Jan Smuts_; the name, and the
figure-head