“Perfect,” Jason said. “I’ll set up here. Now how do I talk to you in the ship?”

“Bight here,” she said. “There’s a pretuned setting on this communicator. Don’t touch anything else-and particularly not this switch.” She pointed to a large pull-handle set square into the center of the control board. “Emergency launching. Two seconds after that is pulled, the lifeboat is shot free. And it so happens this boat has no fuel.”

“Hands off for sure,” Jason said. “Now have Husky there run me a line with ship’s power and I’ll get this stuff set up.”

The detector was simple, though the tuning had to be precise. dish-shaped antenna pulled in the signal for the delicately balanced detector. There was a sharp falloff on both sides of the input so direction could be precisely determined. The resulting signal was fed to amplifier stage. Unlike the electronic components of the first stage, this one was drawn in symbols on white paper. Carefully glued-on input and output leads ran to aft.

When everything was ready and clamped into place, Jason nodded to Meta’s image on the screen. “Take her up-and easy, please. No of your nine-G specials. Go into a slow circle around the perimeter, a till tell you differently.”

Under steady power the ship lifted and grabbed for altitude, then eased into its circular course. They made five circuits of the city before Jason shook his head.

“The thing seems to be working fine, but we’re getting too much noise from all the local life. Get thirty kilometers out from the city a start a new circuit.”

The results were better this time. A powerful signal came from the direction of the city, confined to less than a degree of arc.

With antenna fixed at a right angle to the direction of the ship’s flight, signal was fairly constant. Meta rotated the ship on its main axis, until Jason’s lifeboat was directly below.

“Going fine now,” he said. “Just hold your controls as they are a keep the nose from drifting.”

After making a careful mark on the setting circle, Jason turned the receiving antenna through 180° of arc. As the ship kept to its circle he made a slow collecting sweep of any signals beamed at the city. They were halfway around before he got a new signal.

It was there all right, narrow but strong. Just to be sure, he let I ship complete two more sweeps, and he noted the direction on the gyro compass each time. They coincided. The third time around he called to Meta.

“Get ready for a full right turn, or whatever you call it. I think I have our bearing. Get ready-now.”

It was a slow turn and Jason never lost the signal. A few times it wavered, but he brought it back on. When the compass settled down, he pushed on more power.

They set their course toward the native Pyrrans.