Checkpoint Lambda

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Scott ran into the situation on a supposedly almost-routine tour of duty on Checkpoint Lambda. It was to be his first actual independent command as a Space Patrol commissioned officer. Otherwise the affairs of the galaxy seemed to be proceeding in a completely ordinary fashion. On a large scale, suns burned in emptiness, novas flamed, and comets went bumbling around their highly elliptical orbits just as usual. On a lesser scale, where the affairs of men were concerned, there seemed to be no deviation from the customary. The Golconda Ship had vanished, to be sure, but it was the habit of that fabulous vessel to disappear once in every four years, while half the galaxy tried to guess where it had gone, and the rest tried to think of ways to intercept it when it came back.

Other human activities were commonplace. Huge bulk-cargo carriers lifted off from spaceports and moved slowly out to emptiness. At appropriate distances the landing grids which had lifted them let go, and the ungainly objects flickered and abruptly disappeared. Actually, they were on their way to destinations light-centuries distant, wrapped in cocoons of overdrive-field which carried them many times faster than light. Sleek, bright metal ships, graceful in outline, shot into being from nothingness and then swam slowly to the point where the same landing grids’ force-fields could lock on and let them down to worlds totally new. Mile-long ships with swimming pools and hundreds of deck-levels carried cargo and passengers between star clusters, and small, grubby cargo craft ferried minerals from airless satellites to the planets they circled. Space-yachts cruised leisurely, while battered tramp ships doggedly nosed into queer corners of space upon their sometimes legitimate business.

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