"Babe!" he snapped. "Are you in? Speak up!" No answer.
His fingers jittery, he set the machine for rewind and replay. The letterhead spoke its piece tinnily, then the voice of Babe MacNeice snapped out, briskly over the wires:
"Hello, Barty. This'll get to you sooner or later, if you survive. It'd be too much to hope that I'd have you on the wire. Things must be pretty whacky down there—eh? I'll begin the report in good order.
"Took off—hell, you, saw me. Went toward Arided without any trouble. Was hailed, by a lot of freighters and sundry obsolete crates that had no business being in the ether. They seemed to think that I was going the wrong way. Few billion off Arided transceiving got muddy; then I slapped right into a zone where there simply wasn't any getting electricity or magnetism through at all.
"I sighted something in the deeps where there wouldn't be any Earthly ships around, so I did a quick fade. That's greekish for dodging and twisting so fast that I caught up with my own light-waves. After a few minutes of that I streaked straight behind a star. They probably hadn't seen anything move; so fast, so they weren't ready.
