The Mekinese ship was a cruiser, and it broke out of overdrive within
the Tralee solar system just two days, four hours, and some odd minutes
after Gwenlyn predicted its coming. Presumably, it had made the
customary earlier breakout to correct its course and measure the
distance remaining to be run. In overdrive there was not as yet a way to
know accurately one's actual speed, and at astronomical distances small
errors piled up. Correction of line was important, too, because a course
that was even a second off arc could mount up to hundreds of thousands
of miles. But even with that usual previous breakout, the Mekinese
cruiser did not turn up conveniently close to its destination. It needed
a long solar-system drive to make its planetfall.
Bors's long-range radar picked it up before it was near enough to notify
its arrival to the planet--if it intended to notify at all. Most likely
its program was simply and frighteningly to appear overhead and
arrogantly demand the services of the landing-grid to lower it to the
ground.
Bors's radar detected the cruiser and instantly cut itself off. The cry
of "_Co-o-ntact!_" went through the ship and all inner doors closed,
sealing the ship into sections. Bors was already at the board in the
control room. He did not accept the predictions of Talents, Incorporated
as absolute truth. It bothered him that such irrational means of
securing information should be so accurate. So he compromised in his own
mind to the point where, when Talents, Incorporated gave specific
information, it was possible; no more. Then, having admitted so much, he
acted on the mere possibility, and pretended to be surprised when it
turned out to be a fact.
That was the case now. A ship had appeared in this solar system at the
time the ship-arrival Talent on the _Sylva_ predicted. Bors scowled, and
swung the _Isis_ in line between Tralee and the new arrival. He turned,
then, and drove steadily out toward it. The other ship's screens would
show a large blip which was the planet, and in direct line a very much
smaller blip which was the _Isis_. The small blip might not be noticed
because it was in line with the larger. If it were noticed, it would be
confusing, because such things should not happen. But the cruisers of
Mekin were not apt to be easily alarmed. They represented a great
empire, all of whose landing-grids were safely controlled, and though
there was disaffection everywhere there was no reason to suspect
rebellion at operations in space.
For a long time nothing happened. The _Isis_ drove to meet the cruiser.
The two vessels should be approaching each other at a rate which was the
total of their speeds. Bors punched computer-keys and got the
gravitational factor at this distance from Tralee's sun. He set the
_Isis's_ solar-system drive to that exact quantity. He waited.
His own radar was now non-operative. Its first discovery-pulse would
have been observed by the Mekinese duty-officer. The fact that it did
not repeat would be abnormal. The duty-officer would wonder why it
didn't come again.
The astrogation-radar cut off. Then a single strong pulse came. It would
be a ranging-pulse. Cargo-ship radars sacrificed high accuracy for wide
and deep coverage. But war-vessels carried pulse instruments which could
measure distances within feet up to thousands of miles, and by
phase-scrambling among the echoes even get some information about the
size and shape of the object examined. Not much, but some.
Bors relaxed. Things were going well. When four other ranging-pulses
arrived at second intervals, he nodded to himself. This was a warship's
reaction. It could be nothing else. That officer knew that something was
coming out from Tralee. It was on approximately a collision course. But
a ship traveling under power should gain velocity as long as its drive
was on. When traveling outward from the sun and not under power, it
should lose velocity by so many feet per second to the sun's
gravitational pull. Bors's ship did neither. It displayed the remarkably
unlikely characteristic of absolutely steady motion. It was not normal.
It was not possible. It could not have any reasonable explanation, in
the mind of a Mekinese.
Which was its purpose. It would arouse professional curiosity on the
cruiser, which would then waste some precious time attempting to
identify it. There wouldn't be suspicion because it didn't act
suspiciously. Still, it couldn't be dismissed, because it didn't behave
in any recognizable fashion. The cruiser would want to know more about
it; it shouldn't move at a steady velocity going outward from a sun.
In consequence, Bors got in the first shot.
He said, "Fire one!" when the Mekinese would be just about planning to
turn their electron-telescope upon it. A missile leaped away from the
_Isis_. It went off at an angle, and it curved madly, and the
instrumentation of the cruiser could spot it as now there, now here, now
nearer, and now nearer still. But the computers could not handle an
object which not only changed velocity but changed the rate at which its
velocity changed.
Missiles came pouring out of the Mekinese ship. They were infinitesimal,
bright specks on the radar-screen. They curved violently in flight
trying to intercept the _Isis's_ missile. They failed.
There was a flash of sun-bright flame very, very far away. There was a
little cloud of vapor which dissipated swiftly. Then there was nothing
but two or three specks moving at random, their target lost, their
purpose forgotten. The fact of victory was an anticlimax.
"All clear," said Bors grimly.
The inner-compartment doors opened. The normal sounds of the ship were
heard again. Bors began to calculate the data needed for the journey to
Garen. There was the angle and the distance and the proper motions and
the time elapsed.... He found it difficult to think in such terms. He
was discontented. He'd ambushed a Mekinese cruiser. True, he'd let his
own ship be seen, and the Mekinese had warning enough to launch missiles
in their own defense. It was not even faintly like the ambush of a
cruiser on the bottom of a Kandarian sea, waiting to assassinate a fleet
when its complement went on board. But Bors didn't like what he'd just
done.
The figures wouldn't come out right. Impatiently, he sent for Logan. The
mathematical Talent came into the control room.
"Will you calculate this for me?" Bors asked irritably.
Logan glanced casually at the figures and wrote down the answer.
Instantly. Without thought or reflection. Instantly!
Bors couldn't quite believe it. The distance between the two stars was a
rounded-off number, of course. The relative proper motion of the two
stars had a large plus-or-minus bugger factor. The time-lapse due to
distance had a presumed correction and there was a considerable probable
error in the speed of translation of the ship during overdrive. It was a
moderately complicated equation, and the computation of the probable
error was especially tricky. Bors stared at it, and then stared at
Logan.
"That's the answer to what you have written there," said Logan
condescendingly, "but your figures are off. I've been talking to your
computer men. They've given me the log figures on past overdrive jumps
and the observed errors on arrival. They're systematic. I noticed it at
once."
Bors said, "What?"
"There's a source of consistent error," Logan said patiently. "I found
the values to correct it, then I found the source. It's in your
overdrive speed."
Bors blinked. Speed in overdrive could not be computed exactly. The
approximation was very close--within a fraction of a tenth of one per
cent--but when the distance traveled was light-years the uncertainty
piled up.
"If you use these figures," said Logan complacently--and he scribbled
figures swiftly--"you'll get it really accurate."
Having finished writing the equation, he wrote the solution. Bors asked
suspicious questions. Logan answered absently. He knew nothing about
overdrive. He didn't understand anything but numbers and he didn't know
how he did what he did with them. But he'd worked backward from observed
errors in calculation and found a way to keep them out of the answer.
And he'd done it all in his head. It was unbelievable--yet Bors
believed.
"I'll try your figures," he said. "Thanks."
Logan went proudly away, past an orderly bringing cups of coffee to the
control room. Bors aimed the ship according to the calculation Logan had
given him, scrupulously setting the breakout timer to the exact figure
listed.
He was still uncomfortable about the destruction of the Mekinese cruiser
when he said curtly, "Overdrive coming!" He'd have preferred a more
sportsmanlike type of warfare. He faced the old, deplorable fact that
fighting men had had to adjust to throughout the ages; one can fight an
honorable enemy honorably, but against some men scruples count as
handicaps.
"Swine!" growled Bors. "They'll make us like them!" Then into the
microphone he said, "Five, four, three, two, one...."
He pressed the overdrive button. The sensation of going into overdrive
was acutely uncomfortable, as always. Bors swallowed squeamishly and
took his cup of coffee.
The _Isis_, then, lay wrapped in a cocoon of stressed space. Its
properties included the fact that its particular type of stress could
travel much more swiftly than the stresses involved in the propagation
of radiation, of magnetism, or gravity. And this state of stress--this
overdrive field--did not have a position. It _was_ a position. The ship
inside it could not be said to be in the real cosmos at all, but when
the field collapsed it would be somewhere, and the way it pointed, and
how long before collapse, determined in what particular somewhere it
would be when it came out. But travel in overdrive was tedious.
As civilization increases man's control of the cosmos, it takes the fun
out of it. In prehistoric days a man who had to hunt animals or go
hungry may often have gone hungry, but he was never bored by the
sameness of his meals. A man who traveled on horseback often got to his
destination late, but he was not troubled with ennui on the way. In
overdrive, Bors's ship traveled almost with the speed of thought, but
there was absolutely nothing to think about while journeying. Not about
the journey, anyhow.
While the ship drove on, however, the cargo-ship seized on Tralee made
its way toward Glamis and a meeting with the fleet, then gloomily
sweeping in orbit around Glamis Two. The food it carried would raise
men's spirits a little, but it would not solve the problem of what the
fleet was to do. Morgan, on the flagship, expounded the ability of his
Talents to perform the incredible, but nobody could find any application
of the incredible to the fix the fleet was in. On Kandar, the population
knew that there had been a battle off the gas-giant planet, but they did
not know the result. The Mekinese fleet had not come. The fleet of
Kandar had not returned. The caretaker government met in council and
desperately made guesses. It arrived at no hopeful conclusion whatever.
The most probable--because most hopeless--conviction seemed to be that
the fleet of Mekin had been met and fought, but that it was victorious,
and in retaliation for resistance it had gone away to send back swarms
of grisly bomb-carriers which would drop atomic bombs in such quantity
that for a thousand years to come there would be no life on Kandar.
The light cruiser, the _Isis_, was unaware of these frustrations. It
remained in overdrive, where absolutely nothing happened.
Bors reviewed his actions and could not but approve of them tepidly.
He'd sent food to the fleet, he'd destroyed two enemy fighting ships and
he'd done what he could to harm the Mekinese puppets on Tralee. He'd had
them publicly humiliated with well-chosen epithets. He'd destroyed the
records and archives of the secret political police.... Many people on
Tralee already blessed him, without knowing who he was. There might yet
be hope of better days.
But all things end, even journeys at excessively great multiples of the
speed of light. The overdrive timer rang warning bells. Taped breakout
notifications sounded from speakers throughout the ship. There was a
count-down of seconds, and the abominably unpleasant sensation of
breakout, and the ship was in normal space again.
There was the sun of Garen, burning peacefully in a vast void with
millions of minute, unwinking lights in the firmament all about it.
There was a gas-giant planet, a mere fifteen million miles away. Further
out there were the smaller, frozen worlds. Nearer the sun, on the far
side of its orbit, there was the planet Garen.
The _Isis_ drove for that planet, while Bors tried to decide whether the
remarkable accuracy of this breakout was due to accident or to Logan's
computations.
Logan appeared as Bors was gloomily contemplating the days needed to
reach Garen on solar system drive, because overdrive was too fast. Logan
looked offhand and elaborately casual, but he fairly glowed with
triumph.
"I found out the fact behind the bugger factor, Captain," he said
condescendingly. "The speed of a ship in overdrive varies as the change
in mass to the minus fourth. Your computers couldn't tell that! Here's a
table for calculating the speed of a ship in overdrive according to its
mass and the strength of the overdrive field."
"Fine," said Bors without enthusiasm.
"And to go with it," said Logan, his voice indifferent, but his eyes
shining proudly, "just for my own amusement, I computed a complete table
of overdrive speeds for this particular ship, with different strengths
of field. They run from one point five light-speeds up to the maximum
your equipment will give. You have to correct for changes of mass, of
course."
Bors was not quite capable of enthusiasm over the computation of tables
of complex figures. He simply could not share Logan's thrill of
achievement in the results of the neat rows of numerals. Nor had he
struggled unduly to grasp the implication of Logan's explanation.
Instead, he said politely, "Very nice. Thank you very much."
Logan's eyes ceased to shine. His wounded pride made him defiant.
"Nobody else anywhere could have worked out that table!" he said
stridently. "Nobody! Morgan said you'd appreciate my work! He said you
needed my talent! But what good do you see in it? You think I'm a
freak!"
Bors realized that he'd been tactless. Logan's experiences before
Talents, Incorporated had made him unduly sensitive. He'd done something
of which he was proud, but Bors didn't appreciate its magnitude. Logan
reacted to the frustration of his vanity.
"Hold it!" said Bors. "I'm not unappreciative. I'm stupid and worried
about something. You just figured an overdrive jump for me that's the
most accurate I ever heard of! But I'm desperate for time and we've got
to spend two days in solar-system drive because we can't make an
overdrive hop of less than light-days! So we're losing forty-eight hours
or more."
Logan said as stridently as before:
"But I just showed you you don't have to! Cut the field-strength
according to that table."
Bors was jolted. It was suddenly self-evident. Logan had said he'd
figured a table of overdrive fields for the _Isis_ which would work for
anything between one point five light-speeds to maximum. One point five
light-speeds!
It was one of those absurdities in technology that so often go so long
before they are noticed. During the development of overdrive, it had
been the effort of every technician to get the fastest possible drive.
It was known that with a given mass and a given field-strength, one
could get an effective speed of an unbelievable figure. Men had spent
their lives trying to increase that figure. But nobody'd ever tried to
find out how _slowly_ one could travel in overdrive, because
solar-system drive took care of _short_ distances!
"Wait a minute!" said Bors, staring. "Do you really mean I can drive
this ship under two light-speeds in overdrive?"
"Look at the table!" said Logan, trembling with anger. "Look at it!
You'll find the figures right there!"
Bors looked. Then he stood up quickly. He left the ship in the care of
his second-in-command and plunged into a highly technical discussion
with its engineers.
He ran into violent objections. The whole purpose of overdrive was high
speed between stars. The engineers insisted that one had to use the
strongest possible field. If the field were made feeble, it would become
unstable. Everybody knew that the field had to be of maximum strength.
"We'll try minimum," said Bors coldly. "Now let's get to work!"
He had to do much of the labor himself, because the engineers found it
necessary to stop at each stage of the effort to explain why it should
not be done. He had almost to battle to get an auxiliary circuit
paralleling the main overdrive unit, with a transformer to bring down
voltage, and a complete new power-supply unit to be cut into the
overdrive line while leaving the standard ready for use without delay.
He went back to the control room. He took a distance-reading on the huge
planet off to port. He threw on the new, low-power overdrive field. He
held it for seconds and broke out. It was still in sight.
The speed of the _Isis_, with the adjusted overdrive, was one point
seven lights.
Now, instead of spending days in solar-system drive for planetary
approach, Bors went into the new-speed drive and broke out in eleven
minutes twenty seconds, and was within a hundred thousand miles of
Garen. He'd saved two days and secured the promise of many more such
valuable feats.
As soon as the _Isis_ broke to normal space near Garen, there was a call
on the communicator. A familiar voice;
"_Calling_ Isis! _Calling_ Isis! Sylva _calling_ Isis!"
Bors said softly, "Damnation! For the second time, what are you doing in
this place?"
Gwenlyn's voice laughed.
"_Traveling for pleasure, Captain Bors! I've news for you. We were
allowed to land and then told to leave again. There's a warship down
below. I told you about it before. It's still there. There's a huge
cargo-ship, too, and there are riots because it's almost finished
loading with requisitioned foodstuffs for Mekin. Mekin is--would you
believe it?--unpopular on Garen!_"
"Very well," said Bors. "I'll see what can be done. Will you carry a
message for me?"
"_Happy to oblige, Captain!_"
"Tell them that--" Then Bors stopped short. It was not probable that the
fleet wave-form and frequency were known to Mekinese ships. But the
possibility of low-speed overdrive travel was much too important a
military secret to risk under any circumstances. He said, "I'll be along
very shortly with some highly encouraging news."
"_Who do I tell this to?_"
"I name no names on microwaves," he told her. "Get going, will you?"
"_To hear_," said Gwenlyn cheerfully, "_is to obey_."
Her communicator clicked off. The _Sylva_ showed on a radar-screen, but
had not been near enough to be sighted direct. The blip shot out from
the planet.
Bors growled to himself. The _Isis_ floated a hundred thousand miles off
Garen. There was no challenge. There was no query from the planet. But
Gwenlyn said that there were riots down below. They could be serious
enough to absorb the attention usually given to routine. But there was
another reason for this inattention. Garen was a part of the Mekinese
empire which was not encouraged to trade off-planet except through
Mekin. Very few non-Mekinese ships would ever land there, and therefore
wouldn't be watched for. It was unlikely that a long-range radar
habitually swept space off Garen. The battleship should be more alert,
but again there was no danger of space-borne rebellion, and the affair
of Kandar might not have been bruited so far away.
But the spaceport would respond to calls, certainly. Bors considered
these circumstances. A large cargo-ship loaded with foodstuffs
requisitioned to be sent to Mekin. A population which had been
rebellious before--witness the battleship aground to overawe
resistance--and now was rioting.
Bors called for the extra members of his crew. He uncomfortably outlined
the action he had in mind. There was one part that he disliked. He had
to stay on board ship. The important action, as he saw it, would take
place elsewhere. It was so obviously painful for him to outline a course
of action in which other men must take risks he couldn't share, that his
men regarded him with pleased affection which he did not guess at. In
the end he asked for twenty volunteers, and got fifty.
He swung the _Isis_ around to the night side of the planet. Its two port
blisters opened and two boats floated free in the orbit Bors had
established. The ship moved on ahead.
Just at sunup where the spaceport stood, a voice growled down from outer
space.
"_Calling ground!_" it said contemptuously. "_Calling ground! This is
the last ship left of the fleet of Kandar. We're pirates now and we're
looking for trouble! There's a battleship down there. Come up and fight
or we blast you in your spaceport! Just to prove we can do it--watch!_"
Bors said, "Fire one," and a missile went off toward the planet. It was
fused to detonate at the very tip of the fringes of the planet's
atmosphere.
It did. There was light more brilliant than a thousand suns. The long
low shadows of sunrise vanished. The new-rising sun turned dim by
comparison.
The voice from space spoke with intolerable levity. "_Come up with your
missiles ready! We'll give you ten thousand miles of height. And if you
try to duck out in overdrive...._"
The voice was explicit about what it would do to the Mekinese-occupied
areas of Garen if the battleship fled.
It came up to fight. It could do nothing else.