"You see, May Day is a very ancient code call of ours. It means, simply, Help me.”
“Oh-ho,” said Arghun. He slapped his thigh. His own laughter barked forth. “Yes, I see it now. Thanks, friend, for a joke to tell my grandchildren!”
“A classic,” agreed Flandry with his normal modesty. "My corps was bound to send a ship to investigate. Knowing little or nothing, its men would be on the qui vive. In view of the message on the Tower, Oleg’s tale of my accidental death would be obviously disregarded. But I figured I could trust my chums to keep their mouths shut and pretend to be taken in by him. My problem was, how to inform them of the real situation, without Oleg knowing they had been informed,
“You can easily guess how that was done. We maneuvered the Tebtengri Shamanate over the plains, forming Terran letters big enough to be seen with the naked eye from a ship just getting into clear space. The subsequent letters could be smaller, since the Callisto people would use telescopes as soon as they realized what was going on. I wrote a note, short but to the point, across the whole damn steppe.”
He filled his lungs with the keen air. Through all his weariness the magnificence of being alive flowed into him. He grinned and finished, “I daresay those were the biggest letters ever written. So big that you had to get off the planet to read them.”
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