All civilization was by the ears--it had become a hornet's nest prodded by a pole no one could understand or parry.
And the Master, sitting at his desk with reports and messages piling up before him, with all controls at his finger-tips, smiled very grimly to himself.
"If they show such hysteria at just the initial stages of the game," he murmured, "what will they show when--" The Legion had already begun to fall into well-disciplined routine, each man at his post, each doing duty to the full, whether that duty lay in pilot-house or cooks' galley, in engine-room or pit, in sick-bay or chartroom.

The gloom caused by the death and burial at sea of Travers, the New Zealander, soon passed.

This was a company of fighting men, inured to death in every form.

And death they had reckoned as part of the payment to be made for their adventuring.
This, too, helped knit the fine mass-spirit already binding them together into a coherent, battling group.
A little after two in the afternoon, _Nissr_ passed within far sight of the Azores, visible in cloud-rifts as little black spots sown on the waters like sparse seeds on a burnished plate of metal.

This habitation of man soon slipped away to westward, and once more nothing remained but the clear, cold severity of space, with now and then a racing drift of rain below, and tumbling, stormy weather all along the sea horizons.
The Master and Bohannan spent some time together after the Azores had been dropped astern and off the starboard quarter.