him.

He looked at the control board, and could have done with a little
information himself. When the ship was built, generations ago, there'd
been controls installed which would be quite useless now. When the
present working instruments were installed, it had been done so hastily
that the wires and relays behind them were not concealed, and it was
these that gave him the clues to understand them.

The space ark's door opened. Hoddan backed his ship out. Its rockets had
surprising power. He reflected that the Lawlor drive wouldn't have been
designed for this present ship, either. There'd probably been a quantity
order for so many Lawlor drives, and they'd been installed on whatever
needed a modern drive-system, which was every ship in the fleet. But
since this was one of the smallest craft in the lot, with its low mass
it should be fast.

"We'll see," he said to nobody in particular.

Out in emptiness, but naturally sharing the orbit of the ship from which
it had just come, Hoddan tried it out tentatively. He got the feel of
it. Then as a matter of simple, rule-of-thumb astrogation, he got from a
low orbit to a five-diameter height where the Lawlor drive would take
hold by mere touches of rocket power. It was simply a matter of
stretching the orbit to extreme eccentricity as all the ships went round
the planet. After the fourth go round he was fully five diameters out at
aphelion. He touched the Lawlor drive button and everybody had that very
peculiar disturbance of all their senses which accompanies going into
overdrive. The small craft sped through emptiness at a high multiple of
the speed of light.

Hoddan's knowledge of astrogation was strictly practical. He went over
his ship. From a look at it outside he'd guessed that it once had been a
yacht. Various touches inside verified that idea. There were two
staterooms. All the hull-space was for living and supplies. None was for
cargo. He nodded. There was a faint mustiness about it. But there'd been
a time when it was some rich man's pride.

He went back to the control room to make an estimate. From the pilot's
seat one could see a speck of brightness directly ahead. Infinitesimal
dots of brightness appeared, grew swiftly brighter and then darted
outward. As they darted they disappeared because their motion became too
swift to follow. There were, of course, methods of measuring this
phenomenon so that one could get an accurate measure of one's speed in
overdrive